Byron (Low Tax) Looper: Killing The Competition

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Uncontested races for the state legislature were a common sight in Tennessee in the 1998 election. In nine of the 18 races for the state senate, candidates were running unopposed. Fifty-six people running for the state house had the luxury of being the only name up for consideration in their district, meaning more than half of the 99 seats in the chamber would go to people who had not been challenged in their election.

Tommy Burks, the longtime state senator for Tennessee's 15th District, was widely considered a lock for his seat even though he had an opponent. Burks had been in the legislature for nearly three decades. The Democratic candidate had built up a reputation as an honest, hardworking, "salt of the earth" kind of fellow.

His challenger, by contrast, had done little to endear himself to voters. Although Byron Looper had managed to get elected tax assessor for Putnam County two years earlier, his tenure in the office had been marked by chaos, litigation, paranoia, and incompetence. Looper had also been indicted on several counts of official misconduct, and was scheduled to go to trial a month after Election Day. Although he appeared on the Republican ticket simply by signing up for the race, the local GOP apparatus (which had opted not to field a candidate against Burks) had no desire to endorse him.

As such, Burks had spent little if any time campaigning to keep his seat. He didn't take out any political advertisements, and no debates with Looper were scheduled. Burks' friends weren't even sure if he had met his rival. Burks instead spent his time working on his 1,000-acre hog and tobacco farm near the town of Monterey.

On the morning of October 19, 1998, Burks began preparing the farm for a visit from local schoolchildren later in the day. It was an annual ritual, with youngsters getting a chance to enjoy a hayride and take home a pumpkin from Burks' pumpkin patch.

A farmhand working on a trailer would recall that the attack on Burks had happened quickly. A black car drove up to the side of Burks' pickup truck, at which point the farmhand heard a loud "pop" sound. The car then sped off, leaving the farm.

When the farmhand went over to the truck, he found Burks sitting in the driver's seat, dead. The 54-year-old state senator had been shot just above his left eye and killed instantly.

Police investigating the murder soon ruled out a number of possible motives. The farmhand and Burks' wife were quickly discounted as potential suspects. There was no indication that anything in Burks' private life, or any of his sometimes controversial political stances, had prompted someone to kill him out of revenge or anger.

A few days later, police asked for the public's help in locating Burks' opponent in the state senate race. The implication was clear: Looper had the most to gain from Burks' demise, and  may have taken matters into his own hands to ensure that his race would be an uncontested one.

Early life

Byron Anthony Looper was born in Cookeville, Tennessee, on September 15, 1964. He spent only a brief amount of time in the area. The family moved to Georgia when he was still a child after his father, a school superintendent, took a job there. Looper's parents divorced soon after.

Looper began attending West Point in 1983, but had to withdraw from the service academy after he fell from a horse and injured his knee. He was honorably discharged and finished his studies at the University of Georgia.

Soon after returning to Georgia, Looper became politically active. He joined the Young Democrats and was elected president of the group but, in an early sign of Looper's abrasive personality, he was later urged to resign. He made his first electoral attempt in 1988, running unsuccessfully for the state legislature at the age of 23. He then worked as a legislative aide for three years.

Looper's resume becomes somewhat muddled at this point. He reportedly enrolled in the Stetson School of Business and Economics at Mercer University. He spent some time in Puerto Rico, and one former member of the Georgia house of representatives recalled that Looper called him up in the early morning hours one day, saying he intended to sue a law school on the island because it refused to teach one of his classes in English. He settled the matter for a small sum. Looper would also claim that he worked for a Bear Stearns affiliate on Puerto Rico and as an assistant to the president of a university, although the latter institution proved nonexistent.

While Looper's political activities were more limited during these years, he still managed to work on the 1988 presidential campaign of Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee. Four years later, he also worked on the successful campaign of Bill Clinton where Gore was the vice presidential pick. Looper's associates would later say that he was disappointed that he hadn't been rewarded for his work with a job in the administration.

Putnam County assessor

In the early 1990s, Looper reappeared in Cookeville, switched to the Republican Party, and immediately threw himself into local politics. In the 1994 election, he challenged incumbent state representative Jere Hargrove for his seat. Looper's campaigns would be characterized by blunt attacks and negativity; he frequently vowed to break up what he saw as a "good ole boy" clique of politicians, and publicly accused his opponents of crime and corruption.

At the same time, Looper made some efforts to try to ingratiate himself with these politicians. Hargrove claimed that despite Looper's "undignified" campaign, he later contacted the state representative asking for his help securing a job in the Farmers Home Administration or some federal agency in Puerto Rico.

Two years later, Looper set his sights on the assessor's office for Putnam County. At first, it seemed like another quixotic effort. The incumbent assessor, Bill Rippetoe, had been in office for 14 years. But Rippetoe was facing criticism for recent property reappraisals, and Looper's campaign efforts added raised further recriminations. Although the campaign did not include any public appearances or debates, Looper loudly accused Rippetoe of cutting deals for friends and vowed that he would lower taxes in the county. On Election Day, he earned about 800 more votes than his opponent to secure a narrow victory.

The voters soon discovered that not only was Looper unable to keep his campaign promises, he was also unable to effectively manage the office to which he had been elected. Despite his promise to lower taxes, he had little ability to affect voters' bills since he had no control over the tax rate. One former campaign worker recalled that Looper rarely showed up for work, and that he jetted off to Puerto Rico for a three-week jaunt shortly after taking office.

Others recalled that Looper was a biased, unlikable person in his official role. They said he talked down to Democrats, promised favors to Republicans, and treated the people of eastern Tennessee with a general condescension, acting like he had been sent there to save them from themselves. Employees in the assessor's office fared little better; Looper was prone to insulting them or terminating their employment if he suspected that they were disloyal to him. At one point, Looper became involved in a fistfight between a county taxpayer and one of the workers in the assessor's office.

Early in his term, Looper announced that he had uncovered $100 million in property that wasn't on the tax rolls. The county commission responded that this kind of backlog was not unusual and that the assessor should focus on doing his job instead of finding controversies.

Such grandiose announcements were not unusual for Looper. He had drawn up a list of hundreds of media outlets across Tennessee, and constantly fired off press releases to highlight the work of his office. These communications frequently railed against the alleged "good ole boy" network in the county and bragged that he was the "most educated" assessor in the state.

Looper also began to show signs of rampant paranoia. His employees recalled that he had a video camera installed to record visitors, and hired a security consultant to scour the premises for hidden microphones or listening devices. He also set up a barrier at the back of his office because he was worried that political enemies were recording his conversations. Forty employees were reportedly fired after Looper accused them of spying on him.

In his official capacity, Looper filed several lawsuits against other county agencies. He charged the Putnam County election commission with voting machine irregularities, a curious attack given his own electoral victory. He also sued to demand access to the phone records of the sheriff's office. Not surprisingly, Looper found himself targeted by litigation as well, including former employees suing for wrongful termination and an attorney who accused the assessor of libel.

Looper was also named in a paternity suit by a former girlfriend, who accused him of raping her and illegally transferring ownership of her home to his name by faking the deed. Looper responded with a statement deriding the woman, saying she "left me with heart palpitations, a small box of memorabilia, and a red G-string." When she threatened him with a $1.2 million lawsuit, however, Looper admitted that he was the father of her child.

In March 1998, an indictment charged Looper with 14 criminal charges including theft of services, official oppression for theft, official misconduct, misuse of county property, and misuse of county employees. Among other things, Looper was accused of arbitrarily reassessing the property of a person who refused to contribute to his campaign, soliciting campaign donations from developers in exchange for lower tax assessments, using county funds and workers for his incessant faxing of press releases, failing to assess some land parcels, and removing one taxpayer's property from the rolls in an attempt to make them ineligible for public office.

A trial was scheduled for December. Henry Fincher, a local attorney, immediately began an effort to remove Looper from office, charging him with neglecting his duties while pursuing a personal political agenda.

Murder of Tommy Burks

Tommy Burks had been in the Tennessee state senate for 28 years when he came up for re-election in 1998. He had long balanced his farming duties with his elected ones, waking up before sunrise to tend to his animals and crops before driving about 100 miles along Interstate 40 to the state capitol in Nashville. At the end of the day, he made the same trip home.

Fellow legislators remembered that Burks never missed a day in the senate, even when he had to navigate through treacherous snowstorms. The weather only prevented him from returning home on one occasion. After Burks' death, a stretch of I-40 would be renamed in his honor.

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Although he was a Democrat, Burks had adopted a number of conservative positions which frequently put him at odds with his own party. He was opposed to gambling and the state lottery, and in 1991 sponsored a bill to criminalize abortion in cases where the mother's life was not in danger. He also sponsored a widely derided bill to dismiss Tennessee teachers who taught evolution as fact. Burks' less controversial stances included support for anti-drug programs, public television, and crime victims' rights.

Burks had also sponsored a bill which would publicly shame first-time offenders convicted of driving under the influence, requiring them to pick up roadside trash while wearing orange vests emblazoned with the message "I am a drunk driver." This may have rankled Looper, who had been convicted of DUI in Georgia in 1986 and 1987 and unsuccessfully tried to have the charges expunged from his record.

There was little reason to view Looper's challenge to the popular state senator as anything other than a farce. He had even taken the bizarre step of legally changing his middle name to (Low Tax), parentheses included, and proudly included this moniker on all of his advertising materials. Though he had filed to run against Burks, he had simultaneously joined the race to challenge Representative Bart Gordon, a Democrat, for his House of Representatives seat; Looper abandoned this race after finishing third in the Republican primary. He declared public service to be "the most noble of all pursuits" and voiced his opposition for "big government, high taxes, fast spending, and mollycoddling criminals."

Following Burks' murder, public attention quickly turned to Looper. As the case gained national attention, residents in eastern Tennessee questioned why he seemed to have gone into hiding. It was also considered highly suspicious that Looper hadn't bothered to call Burks' widow, Charlotte, to offer his condolences. The state senator's death had not only left Burks' three daughters without a father, it had also occurred on the birthday of his middle child.

State law spelled out a clear motive for the crime. If a candidate for office died within 40 days of the election, their name could not appear on the ballot. Since Burks had been killed within this window, his name would be removed and Looper's would be the only one legally eligible in the state senate race for the 15th District.

Soon after Burks' murder, local Democrats encouraged Charlotte to mount a write-in campaign to succeed her husband and ensure that Looper wouldn't win by default. Although Republicans needed to flip just two Democratic seats to take control of the state legislature, they backed Charlotte's candidacy and disavowed Looper. Brad Todd, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party, declared, "We did not recruit Mr. Looper to run for state senate or any other office. We have not assisted his campaign in any material way, nor will we."

On October 24, after a four-day absence, Looper returned to his home. He was promptly arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and held on a $1.5 million bond.

Byron Looper's mugshot following his arrest (Source)

The arrest did not disqualify Looper from the race since he had only been charged with a felony, not convicted. To further complicate matters, he was still the Putnam County tax assessor. From his jail cell, he fired his deputy tax assessor, leaving the office with no one in charge. Two more ouster petitions were filed against him, and the state finally stepped in to remove him in January 1999 after he attempted to keep doing his job while incarcerated.

The strange circumstances of the election generated strong turnout on Election Day. When the ballots were counted, Charlotte had won in an overwhelming landslide: 30,252 votes, or about 93 percent of the ballots cast in the district. It was said to be the first successful write-in campaign in Tennessee.

Charlotte Burks speaking at a legislative breakfast in 2012. (Source)

Looper still managed to collect 1,531 votes, although some of these were no doubt early votes that had been filed before his arrest. However, some of Looper's supporters questioned the motives of investigators, noting that Looper had publicly attacked them in the past. The police were also releasing little information on how they had tied Looper to Burks' murder; this evidence would be presented two years later, when Looper went to trial.

Trial


In the lead-up to the trial, Looper changed attorneys eight times. Although the murder charge was eligible for the death penalty, the Burks family declined to pursue it; they felt a life sentence would offer more closure than the ongoing appeals a death penalty case would generate.

The trial got underway on August 14, 2000. In the opening statement, District Attorney Bill Gibson declared, "Byron Looper is obsessed with the burning desire for power and public office. He is also a man who knew he didn't have a chance of beating Tommy Burks." The state argued that the murder had been motivated by Looper's desire to gain Burks' position and power, and that Looper was the only one with a motive for the killing. Prosecutor Tony Craighead deemed it an attempt to "win this election with a Smith & Wesson."

One witness recalled that Looper had mentioned the possibility of eliminating his opponent in order to win his election. William Lindsay Adams Jr. said he contacted Looper after spotting an advertisement for the position of his campaign manager. Adams said that Looper asserted that the campaign could be run at minimal expense, especially if his opponent wasn't in the race or if something happened to Burks before Election Day. He opted not to take the job.

But one of the state's most crucial witnesses was Joe Bond, a Marine recruiter and high school friend of Looper's. Bond testified that several months before Burks was murdered, Looper called him to say he was running for office. He also said that he planned to kill his opponent so he could be the only person on the ballot.

Bond said that he passed the remark off as a joke, but became more concerned after Looper began asking him about firearms, including recommendations for guns with reliable accuracy that could be easily concealed. A few months before the murder, Looper visited Bond at his home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, saying it was imperative that he acquire a weapon since the election was fast approaching. Bond said he would do so, even though he had no intention of getting his friend a gun. Looper persisted, repeatedly calling Bond and even sending a $150 money order to cover the cost of the firearm.

On the evening of the murder, Bond testified, Looper had shown up at his home and confessed to killing his opponent. "I did it man, I did it," Bond recalled Looper saying. "I killed that dude." When Bond asked who he was referring to, Looper responded, "That guy I was running against. I busted a cap in that dude's head." Looper told Bond that he had purchased a gun in a private sale, and thrown it out the window of his car after driving for about 10 or 15 minutes.

In March 1999, a man working with a construction company along I-40 had discovered a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson handgun and turned it in to police. A firearms expert later gave his opinion that this was the weapon used in Burks' murder.

Byron Looper during his trial (Source)

Other testimony focused on the car that had been spotted on Burks' farm. Wesley Rex, the farmhand who had seen the car drive up alongside Burks' truck, recalled that it was a black car with circles on the back. He had also identified Looper as the driver after seeing one of his political advertisements on TV on the evening of the murder. A worker at a local fast food restaurant said Looper had shown up at the drive-thru in a dark car on the morning of the murder, nervous and in a rush, and had become extremely upset about a mistake with his order.

Investigators had managed to track down the vehicle Looper had briefly owned around the time of the murder. Two days before Burks was shot, he had purchased a used 1987 Audi sedan from a private seller in Lilburn, Georgia. The vehicle make matched Rex's description, since the Audi symbol featured interlocking circles. A mechanic in Tucker, Georgia, a community about five miles from Lilburn, said a customer who signed his name as "Anthony Looper" had brought the car in for repairs, estimating that it was sometime between October 11 and 20, 1998, and asked to leave it at the shop for a few weeks. Looper later called to say that he no longer wanted the vehicle, and it was resold.

The Audi's tires raised one point of contention. Once the car was discovered, an analysis of its tires found that they did not match the tracks left at the Burks farm. A test of the tires on the Chevrolet Beretta that Looper had been driving when he returned to Tennessee also failed to yield a match. But the man who sold the Audi to Looper still had the receipt for its tires; once these were mounted on the Audi, they left tracks that matched those at the crime scene. Prosecutors posited that Looper had simply changed the tires after killing Burks; Bond said Looper had told him he planned to do so.

A good portion of the defense strategy focused on an attempt to discredit the story put forward by Bond. Looper's attorneys, former Georgia state legislator McCracken Poston and former California legislator Ron Cordova, tried unsuccessfully to impeach Bond as a witness. They instead accused him of seeking revenge against Looper since the defendant had made advances against his girlfriend (later wife) when they were teenagers. One witness said Bond didn't have a reputation for truthfulness. The defense also called Bond's mother-in-law to the stand to suggest that Bond didn't have a good enough relationship with Looper to host him in the fall of 1998, since he had asked Looper to leave his residence during a visit in the summer after learning that his wife was uncomfortable with the defendant.

Several years later, Cordova would suggest that Looper may have helped set up Burks' murder, but didn't carry out the crime. He said he did not think that Looper was capable of killing Burks on his own, but may have recruited Bond to do so; however, he stressed that it was only a theory and he didn't have any evidence to back it up. The defense never presented an alternate suspect at the trial, and the prosecution pointed out that Rex had seen only one person in the car fleeing the scene.

Both Cordova and Poston believed that there was reasonable doubt that Looper had killed Burks. They had Looper's mother present an alibi, testifying that her son had been staying with her at the time of the murder; however, she had last seen him on the evening before the murder and had not seen Looper during the morning.

Poston later said that Looper had helped to sabotage his own case by withholding information from his attorneys. But Cordova and Poston felt that Looper did not have a legitimate motive for killing Burks, since they believed he would have known he would be caught and that Charlotte would likely be recruited to run in her husband's place. "The evidence is going to show that Byron Looper knows how to win an election," Poston said in his opening statement. "The evidence also is going to show that he knows how to lose one and move on. Mr. Looper's weapon has always been words, and that's never changed."

The defense positions failed to impress the jury. After deliberating for just over two hours, they returned a guilty verdict. On August 23, 2000, Looper was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Aftermath

Looper was held in the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary until this prison closed in 2009. He was then transferred to the nearby Morgan County Correctional Complex. He never went to trial on the official misconduct charges, which the state opted not to pursue since Looper had already been condemned to a life behind bars.

Throughout his sentence, Looper maintained his innocence and occasionally tried to appeal his guilty verdict. His cell was strewn with legal papers, and he targeted a variety of entities with civil suits. He sued a TV station, saying they had misrepresented their intentions when interviewing him and aired a program that portrayed him in a negative light, as well as the Tennessee Department of Corrections, which he said had failed to adequately treat him and other prisoners for health problems.

On June 26, 2013, Looper reportedly struck a pregnant prison counselor on both sides of her head, knocking off her glasses. The incident occurred during a discussion between the counselor and a prison unit manager about a request Looper had made; he apparently became upset after learning that he would be transferred from solitary confinement into the general population, since he was worried that he was a high-profile prisoner and would be hurt by other inmates.

Prison authorities said that Looper was restrained with "the least amount of force necessary." Two hours later, he was found dead in his cell.

An autopsy determined that cardiac issues were the primary cause of Looper's death, as he had experienced high blood pressure and the hardening of his arteries. This health issue was compounded by toxic levels of antidepressants he had been taking.

Looper's family and attorneys were suspicious of this conclusion. Poston declared the circumstances of Looper's death to be "extremely suspicious," saying he had seen Looper's body and thought it looked like he had been severely beaten while hogtied. There were abrasions and contusions around his head, arms, and legs, some of which were consistent with injuries that would be caused by shackles and handcuffs. Another prisoner had written to his girlfriend on the day of Looper's death and mentioned that guards had beaten "some chubby white guy" to death while he was restrained.

Poston also alleged that authorities from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation contacted Charlotte to let her know about Looper's death, while Looper's mother did not find out until she saw a news report on her son's demise. He said Looper's mother was initially told that her son would be charged with assault after touching a counselor on her arm, but that prison authorities later changed their story to say Looper had slapped the counselor. Poston said a nurse had treated Looper for a head wound about an hour before he was found dead.

The Tennessee Department of Correction responded to the allegations by simply referring to the conclusions of the autopsy. Looper's family commissioned a second autopsy, which determined that Looper's heart was not abnormally large at the time of his death. Poston and Looper's family never issued a follow-up on any other findings.

Charlotte, meanwhile, had proved popular in her own right. She continued to serve in the state senate until opting not to run for re-election in 2014.

Sources

Tennessee Secretary of State, "In Tennessee, A Lawmaker Dies and His Rival Vanishes" in the Washington Post on Oct. 23 1998, "Tennessee Senator's Killing and Opponent's Arrest Upend Small Town" in the New York Times on Oct. 24 1998, "Tennessee Lawmaker Killed; Election Opponent Arrested" in the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 24 1998, "Candidate Jailed in Foe's Slaying" in the Washington Post on Oct. 24 1998, "Suspect Relentlessly Ran For Office" in the Associated Press on Oct. 24 1998, "Suspect in Death of State Senator Obsessed by Foes" in the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 27 1998, "Ex-Tenn. Politician Begins Murder Trial" on CBS News on Aug. 15 2000, "Politician Goes On Trial For Opponent's Murder" in the Journal Times on Aug. 15 2000, "Guilty Verdict in Campaign Murder Trial" on ABC News on Aug. 23 2000, "Looper Found Guilty in Murder of Sen. Tommy Burks" in the Rome News-Tribune on Aug. 23 2000, "Convicted Murderer 'Low Tax' Looper Sues Prison Medical Manager Over Health Care" in the Nashville Post on Jan. 9 2002, "Prison Incident Report Shows Assault Before Byron Looper Found Dead" in the Times Free Press on Jun. 28 2013, "Byron Looper's Attorney Crying Foul in Death of Politician Turned Killer" in the Knoxville News Sentinel on Sep. 13 2013, "Byron Looper's Family Seeks Independent Autopsy After 'Heart Event' Death Report" in the Times Free Press on Jun. 29 2013, "The Death of Senator Tommy Burks and Byron (Low Tax) Looper" in the Nashville Scene on Aug. 16 2018, "Byron Looper" episode of Dying to Belong on Oxygen on Sep. 16 2018, "Way Back When: Looking Back in History" by Bob McMillan in the Herald Citizen compiled on ajlambert.com, State of Tennessee v. Byron Looper, State Jones v. Looper

Andrew Johnson: The First Test of Presidential Impeachment

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The first suggestions that Andrew Johnson should be impeached were raised less than a week into his term as Vice President. On the morning of March 4, 1865, when he was to be sworn into office alongside President Abraham Lincoln, Johnson was suffering from typhoid fever. Meeting his his predecessor, Hannibal Hamlin, he drank a few whiskeys to try to combat the illness.

He apparently had a few too many. By the time Johnson was to give a brief address to the Senate, he was considerably drunk. Slurring his words, he delivered a rambling, incoherent, and overlong address boasting about his humble beginnings and his ultimate triumph over the Southern aristocrats who had looked down on him. At one point, Hamlin even pulled on Johnson's coattails in a futile effort to make him stop talking. After he finally wrapped up the address and took the oath of office, Johnson became so confused with his duty of swearing in the new senators that he turned the task over to a clerk.

The spectacle was all the more embarrassing because it came shortly before Lincoln's stately second inaugural address, which has endured as one of the great speeches of the Civil War. Senators were horrified by Johnson's performance; Senator Zachariah Chandler, a Republican from Michigan, recorded in his diary, "I was never so mortified in my life, had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight." Johnson was ridiculed in the press, with one article labeling him a "drunken clown."

Although Johnson showed no other signs of alcoholism beyond this public display, the speech led to rumors that he was a dipsomaniac. These gained further traction when Johnson, still suffering from typhoid fever, left the Senate for a few days. When he returned on March 11, there were suggestions that he had gone on a chaotic drinking spree. Some Republicans drafted a resolution calling for him to resign, and there was talk of impeachment as a way to remove him from the second highest office in the land.

Lincoln urged his colleagues to be calm, saying his Vice President was still getting accustomed to the job. "It has been a severe lesson for Andy, but I do not think he will do it again," he said.

Just a month later, Lincoln's reassurance would be put to the test as Johnson became President of the United States. Unfortunately, a rift between Johnson and the liberal wing of the Republican Party would quickly deepen, culminating in the first impeachment trial to affect a President of the United States.

Early life

Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808. His father died when he was three years old, and seven years later he was apprenticed to a tailor named James Selby. After working for Selby for five years, Johnson abruptly abandoned the apprenticeship after a neighbor threatened to sue him and his brother, William, for throwing pieces of wood at her house.

Running away to South Carolina, Johnson worked for another tailor for two years. Here he fell in love with a girl and asked her to marry him, but her family objected to the pairing. Dejected, Johnson returned to Raleigh and asked Selby to take him back in. Although Selby had posted notices offering a reward for Johnson's return, he now refused the young man's request.

A notice posted by Selby seeking the return of Andrew Johnson and his brother (Source)

Johnson subsequently moved to Greenville, Tennessee, with his mother and stepmother. Assisted by his wife Eliza, whom he married in 1827, he began a self-education effort. He had also learned enough about the tailoring business to start his own business.

Before long, Johnson had entered politics. He was elected a town alderman in 1829, and as mayor of Greenville in 1834. He joined the state militia around the same time, winning the nickname of "Colonel Johnson" after achieving this rank. Johnson served in the Tennessee house of representatives from 1835 to 1837 and again from 1839 to 1841, when he was elected to the state senate. During his political career, he helped write a new state constitution that eliminated the property-owning requirement to vote or hold office.

Running as a Democrat in 1842, Johnson was elected to the first of five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In this chamber, he came out against a number of spending initiatives including increases to soldiers' pay, accepting funds to start the Smithsonian Institution, infrastructure projects in the nation's capital, and funding to aid the victims and families of a cannon explosion on the USS Princeton that had killed eight people, including two Cabinet officials. Johnson was also opposed to plantation rule and protective tariffs. However, he did express support for the public funding of education.

These stances hint at Johnson's deep-seated hatred for the wealthy elite. He despised any organizations or people he saw as aristocratic, including military academies and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, whom he said was part of the "illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy."

A depiction of Andrew Johnson in 1842, the year he was first elected to the House of Representatives (Source)

Some racist remarks are attributed to Johnson around this time. In 1844, he tacitly supported slavery by declaring that a black man was "inferior to the white man in point of intellect, better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship." His business was also successful enough that he bought a few slaves of his own. He proclaimed himself to be equally critical of both abolitionist and the most virulent pro-slavery plantation owners, saying both were driving the country toward war instead of reconciliation.

When it looked like a gerrymandering effort would threaten his seat in the House, Johnson ran for governor of Tennessee and was elected in 1852. His signature accomplishment during his time in office was the establishment of the first state law supporting public education through taxation. Although he won re-election against Know-Nothing candidate Meredith P. Gentry in 1856, he soon left the governor's office when the state legislature named him to the U.S. Senate.

During his time in the state house of representatives, Johnson had proposed a homestead bill to help Tennessee's poor residents acquire land to cultivate. He made a similar proposal in the Senate, advocating a bill to provide 160-acre plots. Although this bill passed in 1860, it was vetoed by President James Buchanan. Johnson would persist, pushing through the homestead bill in 1862.

Civil War

The long simmering tensions between the North and South finally came to a head in the election of 1860. Fearing that Lincoln would destroy the slave-based economy of the Southern states, many political figures below the Mason-Dixon Line threatened that secession would follow if the Republican candidate was elected President. Johnson sought to strike a balance, throwing his support behind Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge. He also opposed secession and urged Tennessee to remain in the Union if Lincoln came to office.

Breckinridge swept the Southern states, but came far short of Lincoln's electoral total. As calls for secession increased, Johnson continued to advocate for unity. On December 18, just two days before South Carolina became the first state to break away, Johnson pleaded, "Let us exclaim that the Union, the Federal Union, must be preserved!"

The attack on Fort Sumter prompted more states to secede. Johnson traveled throughout Tennessee, making public appearances urging the state to remain loyal to the Union. It was a risky move; despite Johnson's status as an elected official, his stance on secession had become quite unpopular. Across the state, he was burned and shot in effigy. In one instance, Johnson's train was stopped by an angry mob out to lynch the senator; he was reportedly saved only at the intervention of Jefferson Davis. At one appearance, he responded to an angry and hostile crowd by calmly taking a pistol out of his pocket, placing it on the pulpit where it could be quickly taken up at the first sign of trouble, and continuing his address.

Johnson's efforts were for naught. Tennessee voted to secede on June 8, 1861, becoming the last state to leave the Union. Although elected officials typically withdrew from Congress after the secession of their state, Johnson was the only senator from the South to keep his seat. This show of support for the Union made him a popular figure in the North, but he was forced to live in Washington, D.C., to avoid being arrested in Tennessee. Although Eliza continued to live in Greeneville for a time, she too eventually moved to the nation's capital.

The exile was fairly short-lived. After Union troops captured Nashville on March 4, 1862, Lincoln named Johnson to be the state's military governor and awarded him the rank of brigadier general. Resigning from the Senate to take on this duty, Johnson returned to Tennessee to find that the Confederacy had branded him an "enemy alien," subsequently confiscating and selling his property.

Johnson was faced with considerable challenges in his role as military governor of Tennessee. He seized the Bank of Tennessee and records left behind by the fleeing Confederate government, reorganized the Nashville city government, and silenced secessionist newspapers. The Confederacy continued to hold portions of the state and made frequent raids into Union-held territory. In 1863, he was embarrassed when a civil election named a conservative pro-slavery candidate to succeed him. On Lincoln's orders, Johnson ignored the result. He also issued a requirement that Tennessee residents needed to take a loyalty oath to the Union in order to vote, and even then would have to wait six months before casting a ballot.

While governor, Johnson showed more sympathy to the idea of emancipating slaves. But he considered this to be more of a military measure, one which would help end the war by taking valuable resources from the aristocratic plantation owners who had encouraged the war. "Treason must be made odious and traitors punished," he declared at one point. At Lincoln's urging, he worked to incorporate black soldiers into Tennessee regiments to defend against Confederate raids, although these troops never received enough arms or support to become a reliable force.

With the presidential election of 1864 looking to be a particularly close one, the Republicans chose Johnson as a compromise candidate for Vice President to replace Hannibal Hamlin. During the campaign, Johnson also continued to show some resentment for the aristocrats. At one stop in Logansport, Indiana, he noted how his Democratic opponents had laughed him off as a "boorish tailor." Johnson said he took it as a compliment, since it showed how he had risen from humble roots to a successful political career. He held the principle that "if a man does not disgrace his profession, it never disgraces him." In one address, he cited certain plantation owners by name and suggested that the nation would be improved if their land was broken up into smaller plots worked by "loyal, industrious farmers."

Johnson also demonstrated more support for the idea of ending slavery. "Before the rebellion, I was for sustaining the Government with slavery; now I am for sustaining the government without slavery, without regard to a particular institution," he declared in an address at Louisville, Kentucky on October 13, 1864. "Institutions must be subordinate, and the Government must be supreme." In same address, says he supports "the elevation of each and every man, white and black, according to his talent and industry."

Eleven days later, Johnson emancipated Tennessee's slaves. This action, again taken at Lincoln's urging, was essentially a voluntary one; since Tennessee had come under control of the Union at the time the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, it was not considered to be in rebellion and its slaves had not been freed by the order. Johnson seemed particularly happy with emancipaction; on the same day he approved the action, he told a black audience in Nashville, "I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace."

Johnson even wanted to delay his inauguration until April so he could oversee the emancipation process in Tennessee, but Lincoln insisted that he be sworn in on schedule. Historians have noted that it was fortunate that Johnson agreed to take office when he did. If the office of Vice President was vacant at the time Lincoln was assassinated, the presidential succession may have been thrown into limbo.

Accession to President

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Johnson was woken and informed that Lincoln had been shot. The President lingered through the night before passing away the next morning. After scarcely a month as Vice President, Johnson was given the oath of office by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and became the 17th President of the United States.

An illustration showing Johnson being sworn in as President (Source)

It soon emerged that John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, was one of several conspirators aiming to kill a number of high-ranking Union officials in a coordinated assault. Johnson himself had been one of the targets; George Atzerodt had registered at his hotel and, after drinking plenty of alcohol, got cold feet and left without attempting to assassinate Johnson. Atzerodt was arrested soon after, and was one of four conspirators hanged for their role in the plot.

Shortly before his attack on Lincoln, Booth learned of Atzerodt's failure and made a last-ditch effort to frame Johnson as being part of the plot. He left a card for the Vice President with the message, "Don't wish to disturb you. Are you still at home? J. Wilkes Booth." However, this card was instead picked up by Johnson's secretary, who had met Booth after one of his performances and mistakenly thought the card was for him.

Although the process of the disbanding and surrender of Rebel armies was ongoing at the time of Lincoln's death, the Confederacy had essentially ceased to exist. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia five days before Lincoln was shot, and Jefferson Davis would be captured by Union troops about a month later. Johnson was enraged by the conspirators' attack on the Union government, and for a time seemed bent on revenge. He considered pursuing treason charges against the former Confederate military and political leaders, and was only dissuaded at the urging of Ulysses S. Grant.

This pugnacious attitude helped convince the Radical Republicans that Johnson would be a helpful ally in the postwar Reconstruction era. This political faction would be defined by their pursuit of full emancipation and civil rights for ex-slaves. They had been somewhat disappointed by Lincoln's support of gentler forms of repatriation and occasional hindrance of larger reforms. For example, he opted not to sign the Wade-Davis Bill to enforce Reconstruction efforts with federal troops and readmit Southern states only after they agreed to protect the rights of freedmen; instead, he killed the 1864 legislation with a pocket veto.

Senator Ben Wade, a Radical Republican from Ohio and a co-sponsor of the Wade-Davis Bill, declared to the new President, "Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running this government." Such feelings would be short-lived.

Falling out with the Radicals

On May 29, 1865, Johnson issued two proclamations outlining his plans for Reconstruction. The first issued a pardon and a promise of amnesty for any ex-Confederates who were willing to take an oath of loyalty to the Union and pledge to support the emancipation of slaves in the South. He also named William W. Holden as the provisional governor of North Carolina and directed him to amend the state constitution. Similar proclamations were made for other Confederate states, but made no request for a change in voting rules. This meant that black men were still excluded from the ballot box.

In one area, Johnson seemed keen to levy some punishment on the former Confederates. The wealthiest landowners in the South, namely those with estates worth $20,000 or more, would be required to seek individual pardons. It seemed clear that Johnson was relishing the opportunity to have the high and mighty aristocrats groveling before him for forgiveness. Even with this condition, Johnson still agreed to return the land of most plantation owners who made an appeal and grant them a pardon.

Most notably, Johnson failed to intercede when the South made blatant efforts to return Confederate officials to power. The Confederate vice president, along with four generals and five colonels from the Confederate army, were all elected to Congress after the war. Johnson also took no actions when Southern governments began imposing stringent "black codes" to strip the civil rights of black citizens. These included vagrancy laws to have idle black residents arrested and put to work; in short, a de facto form of slavery.

There were signs that whatever support Johnson may have had for emancipation and equality had cooled. He told one group of African-Americans, "The time may soon come when you shall be gathered together in a clime and country suited to you, should it be found that the two races cannot get along together." His private secretary, William G. Moore, recorded that Johnson displayed a "morbid distress and feeling against negroes." In a December 1867 message to Congress, he would remark that "negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people" and were more likely to "relapse into barbarism."

Some historians have suggested that Johnson was not trying to impede the progress of ex-slaves so much as he was trying to keep any Reconstruction efforts within the boundaries set by the Constitution. In his veto of the Civil Rights Act, he said it "contains provisions which I can not approve consistently with my sense of duty to the whole people and my obligations to the Constitution of the United States." When he vetoed a bill to extend the mission of the Freedmen's Bureau, which was assisting former slaves displaced in the wake of emancipation, Johnson reasoned that it was federal encroachment on a state issue and an improper use of the military during peacetime; he also argued that it would hinder ex-slaves from being able to sustain themselves, and said there were no similar provisions for poor white men who had been harmed by the war.

An 1866 political cartoon depicts Johnson using a veto to boot the Freedmen's Bureau (Source)

Johnson agreed with the Radical Republicans on some issues. In particular, he thought that some individual rebels should be punished and that new state governments established in the South should meet certain conditions before the states were formally reabsorbed into the Union. However, he also thought that some of the proposed Reconstruction programs would benefit landowners more than freedmen.

The Radical Republicans were less than pleased at Johnson's acquiescence to the status quo in the South. The former Confederate states were quick to return ex-Confederates to power, some before they had even received a pardon. The political faction was also appalled when, in the summer of 1865, Johnson ordered the Freedmen's Bureau to return abandoned plantation lands to their former owners. In several cases, these lands had already been divided up and distributed to former slaves. While Johnson had originally been welcomed as a leader who would deal firmly with the rebellious states, he was now praised among Southern Democrats as a President who would protect them against the Republican agenda and preserve white supremacy in the region.

At the end of the year, Johnson declared that the work of Reconstruction was complete. The Radical Republican resistance mobilized quickly. Led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, they refused to recognize members of Congress sent by states who had seceded from the Union. They also created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which began working on the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent Southern states from getting a numerical advantage in Congress by excluding black residents from the population count if they weren't allowed to vote.

In a President's Day message in 1866, Johnson complained that the committee was concentrating the government power accompanying Reconstruction into a tiny fringe group. He also said this approach would make the more moderate and conservative Republicans less likely to support his administration.

Radical Republicans passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 in the spring, targeting the black codes in the South and granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Johnson vetoed the legislation, saying it was "made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race." In the first instance of Congress overriding a veto on a major piece of legislation, and by a margin of a single vote in the Senate, Congress overrode the veto to enact the bill. During his time in office, 15 of Johnson's 29 vetoes would be overturned, the most of any U.S. President. These bills included statehood for Nebraska and voting rights of black residents of Washington, D.C.

The most noticeable split between Johnson and the Radical Republicans occurred after he opposed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although he was distrusted by both Democrats and Republicans, the President tried to rally moderate members of both parties in a separate Union Party before the 1866 elections. During a "swing around the circle" campaign to rally support for this effort, he frequently traded insults with hecklers and made embarrassing statements; in one, he suggested that divine intervention had removed Lincoln from office so he could ascend to the White House. After this disastrous campaign, Republicans easily won majorities in both houses of Congress.

Once the new Congress was sworn in, they quickly passed the Reconstruction Act. This legislation divided the former Confederate states into five military districts and installed new governments to oversee the process of bringing the South back into the Union. Johnson vetoed the bill, but the Radical Republican majority easily overturned it.

Another bill passed over the President's veto was the Tenure of Office Act, which made it illegal for the President to dismiss any appointees who had been approved by the Senate without first getting Senate approval. This bill was essentially an effort to head off any effort Johnson might make to dismiss Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln appointee who was allied with the Radical Republicans, and replace him with someone who would guide the military element of Reconstruction in a way that was more in line with Johnson's views. Stanton had already undermined Johnson to some extent, telling Grant he could still continue to impose martial law in the South as needed even after Johnson declared the war officially over, raising the question of whether martial law was still legal. Stanton also vowed to stay in office, saying he considered Johnson to be a man "led by bad passions and the counsel of unscrupulous and dangerous men."

Dismissal of Stanton

Edwin Stanton (Source)

In January 1867, Republican Representative James Ashley of Ohio made the first formal move toward impeaching the President by proposing an inquiry into Johnson's official conduct. He made a number of allegations against Johnson, including suggestions that he had had a role in Lincoln's assassination and that he had sold pardons to former rebels, but offered no proof for these accusations. In June, the House Judiciary Committee voted 5-4 against approving any articles of impeachment.

However, the Republican attitudes toward Johnson soon hardened. During a congressional recess in August, Johnson took the opportunity to remove some of the more vigorous Reconstruction commanders from their posts. He also asked for Stanton to step down, declaring that "public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted." Stanton shot back, "Public considerations of a high character, which alone have induced me to continue at the head of this department, constrain me not to resign." Johnson responded by suspending Stanton and appointing Grant as an interim war secretary in the hopes that he would be more aligned with his views.

In November 1867, the Judiciary Committee reversed itself and approved an impeachment resolution in a 5-4 vote. Representative John Churchill of New York said several matters in recent months had swayed him, including Johnson's statements denouncing Reconstruction efforts, his veto of a third Reconstruction bill, his dismissal of military officers overseeing Reconstruction, and his suspension of Stanton. The majority report made a number of criticisms of the President, saying his lenient attitude toward former rebels was helping to stoke violent incidents in the South, such as a race riot in New Orleans that killed scores of black men demanding the right to vote.

But the report was fairly general in its denunciations. Representative Thomas Williams, the Pennsylvania Republican who chaired the Judiciary Committee, said he did not think impeachment was possible under the circumstances of Johnson's alleged misdeeds as well as the constraints of the Constitution. Although 57 Republicans favored the impeachment resolution in a vote before the full House, 68 joined with 38 Democratic colleagues to oppose it. Another 22 congressmen did not vote on the measure.

On January 11, 1868, the Senate made a move to return Stanton to his post. In a 35-6 decision, they voted to restore him as Secretary of War. Grant did not protest the decision, and soon became embroiled in a battle with Johnson over the question of whether he had supported the President's effort to unseat Stanton. Grant charged that Johnson had sought his help in violating the Tenure of Office Act. This brought on another impeachment effort, led by Stevens, but the Committee on Reconstruction tabled this measure in a 6-3 vote.

Johnson was still itching to get Stanton out of his Cabinet. He offered to name the renowned Civil War general William T. Sherman as an interim War Secretary, but Sherman declined. On February 21, he settled on Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, an opponent of Stanton. Johnson issued one letter appointing Thomas as the interim Secretary of War and a second informing Stanton that he had been removed from office.

Instead of leaving, Stanton ordered Thomas arrested for illegally taking office. He quickly found support from the Republicans in Congress. A Senate resolution, passed in a 29-6 vote, stated that Johnson's action was beyond his power.

Once Thomas was released on bail, he too firmly held that he held the legal right to the office. For a time, the country essentially had two Secretaries of War. Many veterans and militiamen vowed to uphold the legitimacy of one man or the other, sparking fears that the squabble might lead to violence.

A political cartoon showing Stanton preparing to attack Johnson and Lorenzo Thomas, using a cannon labeled "Congress" and the Tenure of Office Act as a rammer. (Source)

The attempted removal of Stanton proved to be enough to get an impeachment effort off the ground. Some in Congress sided with Johnson, accusing the Radical Republicans of overstepping their authority and inflaming sectional divides, but the majority held that Johnson had been the one to exceed the power of his office. On February 24, the House of Representatives voted 126-47 to pursue impeachment. The confrontation with Stanton was the inciting issue, although Stevens suggested that Johnson had also bribed Grant by offering to pay any fine levied against him for violating the Tenure of Office Act by serving as Secretary of War.

There were some suggestions that impeachment was unnecessary. Johnson had no hope of capturing the GOP's presidential nomination, which Republicans expected would go to Grant, so the President had just over a year left in office. "Why hang a man who is bent on hanging himself?" Horace Greeley asked in the New York Tribune. For the Radical Republicans, however, a greater issue was at stake. Johnson could easily wreak havoc on the Reconstruction efforts in his final year in office; by removing him, they would remove that threat.

Impeachment

On March 2, the House of Representatives approved the first article of impeachment against Johnson. Two more articles were passed the next day. Ultimately, the House would seek to remove Johnson based on 11 offenses. It was the first time a President had been impeached. The Constitution states that impeachment can take place if an official is found guilty of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors;" it would fall to the Senate to decide whether Johnson's behavior was enough to convict him on any of the charges and remove him from office.

Nine of the articles of impeachment were essentially different ways of accusing Johnson of violating the Tenure of Office Act. The tenth listed a number of inflammatory comments Johnson had made about Congress, charging that the remarks "brought the high office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace." The final article was a general summary of the charges against Johnson.

There were enough Republicans in the Senate to convict Johnson on any one of these articles of impeachment and remove him from office. But there was also a certain degree of reticence among the GOP senators. The office of Vice President had been vacant since Johnson was sworn in; as president pro tem of the Senate, Benjamin Wade would be next in line to be President if Johnson was removed. Some Republicans were less than enthusiastic about this possible accession, since they saw Wade as being too liberal on Reconstruction issues to prevail in the upcoming presidential election; others disagreed with Wade's economic policies, which included support for high tariffs.

Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who had sworn Johnson in just a few years earlier, would now oversee the impeachment trial in the Senate. Johnson did not attend personally, but spoke to the press on several occasions to offer remarks on the proceedings. Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, a former Civil War general, led the prosecution. Attorney General Henry Stanbery resigned to lead Johnson's defense team,which included three other lawyers who volunteered their services.

An illustration of an impeachment hearing for Johnson (Source)

Butler called 25 witnesses during the trial. The crux of his argument was that Johnson had acquiesced to the Tenure of Office Act by initially following it, but then knowingly violated it by removing Stanton from office. He also blamed Johnson for the unrest in the South, saying his lenient attitude toward former Confederates had emboldened white racists into making violent attacks on black residents and others.

However, Butler also made a number of missteps over the five days of presenting his case. One passage earned a good deal of criticism by telling the senators that they were "bound by no law, either statute or common," but were rather "a law unto yourselves, bound only by natural principles of equity and justice." The prospect of a trial to decide the fate of the President was so exciting that public admission to the galleries was by ticket only, but the testimony soon became tedious. One press account declared the fourth day of Butler's prosecution to be "intensely dull, stupid, and uninteresting."

An admission ticket to the impeachment trial for Johnson (Source)

Johnson's attorneys figured that the nine Democrats and three pro-Johnson Republicans in the Senate would vote for acquittal. In order to deprive the vote of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Johnson, they would need to convince seven Republicans to vote against impeachment. The defense called 16 witnesses to support its case.

The defense focused on the validity of the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson's lawyers argued that the President had no obligation to retain Stanton since he wasn't Johnson's own appointee. Ben Curtis, a former Supreme Court justice and one of Johnson's defenders, pointed out how the bill initially didn't extend to Cabinet officers. The defense also suggested that Johnson may have simply misinterpreted the law, and that he had the right to test the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act and have the matter heard before the Supreme Court. Thomas, they reasoned, had simply been appointed to keep the War Department staffed in the interim. The defense also suggested that the impeachment effort against Johnson wasn't motivated by any serious "high crimes and misdemeanors," but rather by the rancorous relationship between the President and Congress.

In the midst of the proceedings, Johnson consulted with his supporters and decided to blunt the impeachment effort by naming a compromise candidate as War Secretary. On April 21, he offered the position to General John Schofield, a Civil War commander who had been helping to oversee the Reconstruction efforts. Another Johnson lawyer, William M. Evarts, promised that Johnson would cease his efforts to impede the Radical Republicans' policies on Reconstruction if he was acquitted.

The Senate took their first vote, on Article XI, on May 16. This was the catch-all summary of Johnson's misdeeds, and the tally was 35-19 in favor of conviction. It was one short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict; the defense had been successful in swaying seven Republicans to their side. One GOP representative, James Grimes of Iowa, summed up his opposition by saying, "I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious workings of the Constitution for the sake of getting rid of an unacceptable President."

Ten days later, the Senate voted on the first and third articles of impeachment to see if any of the opposing Republicans had been swayed by the prosecution's arguments on the Tenure of Office Act. Both votes failed to convict Johnson in the same 35-19 split. As it appeared that the divide would not change on any of the remaining eight articles, no further votes were taken.

The narrow margin of the acquittal raised suspicions that bribery had been employed to convince just enough senators to vote against conviction. Butler set up an impromptu committee to investigate the matter, interviewing dozens of witnesses and confiscating correspondence and bank records. The committee seemed particularly interested in Edmund Ross, a moderate Republican who had cast the deciding vote against conviction, but the committee ultimately finished its work without presenting any evidence of bribery.

End of term and later life

Following Johnson's acquittal, Stanton stepped down so Schofield could continue working as an undisputed Secretary of War. Johnson continued to spar with the Radical Republicans, vetoing bills related to Reconstruction and earning condemnation for his failure to provide federal protection for black residents and white Unionists who were subject to violent attacks in the South.

Although Johnson harbored no expectations that the Republicans would support him as their presidential pick for the 1868 ticket, he did believe that the Democrats were likely to choose him. Instead, they selected Governor Horatio Seymour of New York. A disappointed Johnson endorsed to be his successor. Grant was chosen as the Republican nominee and easily won the election.

The Tenure of Office Act was sidelined during Grant's presidency, with Congress giving him the ability to fire Cabinet appointees and lower level officials without Senate approval. The act was repealed in 1887, during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. The Tenure of Office Act was referenced several decades later when the Supreme Court took up the case of Myers v. United States. In a 6-3 decision in 1926, the justices ruled that President Wilson had the authority to remove a postmaster from office without Senate approval and that the Tenure of Office Act had been unconstitutional.

Returning to Tennessee, Johnson was soon vying to return to politics. Running as a Democrat, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Senate in 1869 and the House of Representatives in 1872. He was successful in his next bid for Senate, in January 1875, becoming the only President so far to return to serve in this chamber.

Lincoln's other Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, was also a member of this Senate, along with several of the same people who had tried to oust him from the White House seven years earlier. After taking the oath of office, Johnson denied rumors that he would try to fulfill any sort of vendetta against these senators. "I have no enemies to punish nor friends to reward," he declared.

Johnson's time in the Senate was short-lived. He served only from the start of his term on March 5 to the end of a special session on March 24. On July 31, at the age of 66, he died of a stroke near Elizabethton, Tennessee.

Sources: The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, The National Governors Association, "Andrew Johnson, 16th Vice President" at Senate.gov, Andrew Johnson National Historic Site (National Parks Service), "The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson" at Senate.gov, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson by David O. Stewart, The Presidents of the United States by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by Chester G. Hearn, Andrew Johnson by Kate Havelin, The American Presidency, edited by Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, Reconstruction: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic edited by Richard Zuczek

Henry S. Foote: Two-Time Traitor

(Source)

The bitter political rivalry between Henry Stuart Foote and Jefferson Davis was never more apparent than on Christmas Day in 1847. The senators from Mississippi were lodging in the same boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., and a discussion about popular sovereignty grew heated. Although the exchange between the senators is unrecorded, Davis eventually struck Foote after he used language that Davis found offensive.

Others in the room separated the two men, but tempers flared again after Foote pronounced that Davis had "struck first." Davis denounced Foote as a liar and threatened to beat him to death if he repeated the claim. Foote instead punched Davis, who returned the blow. Davis suggested that the two of them go to a locked room where he kept his pistols, a less than subtle challenge to a duel. The bystanders in the boardinghouse finally succeeded in calming the men, suggesting that it was all a case of "Christmas frolic" and that it should be kept private.

However, the issue resurfaced a couple of years later. Davis heard that Foote had been boasting that he had struck Davis with impunity. Davis wrote to Foote to ask the rumor was true, and Foote denied it in a lengthy reply. Davis was not wholly satisfied, but his friends convinced him that it was good enough. They also pointed out that a duel between the two would be seen as unfair; Davis had military experience in both the Black Hawk War and the Mexican War, while Foote was a poor enough shot that he had been wounded in three of the four duels he had participated in.

While the rivalry between Foote and Davis never again rose to violence, they remained bitter rivals even as Davis became president of the Confederacy and Foote reluctantly joined the Confederate Congress. Foote would always have a reputation as a hot-tempered politician who was quick to fight, but also proved to be one of the strongest voices against secession. Yet he would also have the dubious honor of being accused of disloyalty in both the North and the South.

Early life

Foote was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, on February 28, 1804. He graduated from Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in 1819. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1823, and moved to Alabama two years later to begin a practice in Tuscumbia. He also began editing a weekly newspaper.

In his youth, Foote became known for his propensity to fight duels. He was a participant in four contests of honor between 1828 and 1837, challenging an opponent twice and getting challenged on the remaining two occasions. He was shot in the shoulder in the first incident, after which he moved to Mississippi and began practicing law in Jackson, Natchez, Raymond, and Vicksburg. A dispute with fellow lawyer Sergeant S. Prentiss occurred between 1832 and 1833, after Foote threw an inkstand at Prentiss; this action led to a duel where he was again wounded in the shoulder. The rivalry was later rekindled, with Foote receiving "an exceedingly dangerous wound" in the right leg. In his last duel, Foote managed to shoot a rival in the hip during an exchange of five shots.

Not surprisingly, Foote was known for having a short fuse and his quick temper didn't endear him to many people. One Alabama newspaper would compare him to "a high pressure steamboat on fire." He was also well-known for his short stature and bald head. One tongue-in-cheek account described Foote as a "great humbug, perfect gentleman, entire horse, and part alligator."

Foote briefly left Mississippi in 1839 to journey to the Republic of Texas, which had won independence from Mexico three years earlier. Although the republic's leaders wanted it to be annexed to the United States, concerns over incorporating a new slave state into the nation had kept Texas an independent nation. It would remain so until 1845. Foote would write a book on his experience, Texas and the Texans, and publish it in 1841.

Senate

In 1839, Foote won his first political race when he was elected to the Mississippi house of representatives. He was later elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, beginning his term on March 4, 1847. He became chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, an assignment he held throughout his Senate career.

Foote found few friends among his fellow senators, who dreaded his long-winded speeches. If they became particularly impatient with his rhetoric, some senators would start to hiss or groan to try to get him to finish up. "I know my rights," he shot back at one point, "and will maintain them too, in spite of all the groans that may come from any quarter."

The tensions of the antebellum era, coupled with Foote's pugnacious streak and unpopularity, all but guaranteed that his Senate career would come with a few bruises. In addition to the fight with Davis, he got into a brawl with Simon Cameron of Pennslyvania on the last night of the 1848 session. The men came to blows after Foote cut Cameron off as he was speaking, saying Cameron had no right to speak in the Senate since his term had ended. In March 1850, he fought with Senator Solon Borland of Arkansas on a street corner after describing Borland as a "servile follower" of John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina senator and former vice president who was strongly in favor of states' rights and the preservation of slavery.

One senator refused to stoop to violence even in the face of threats from Foote. John P. Hale, a senator from New Hampshire, became known for openly opposing slavery. Though opposed to secession, Foote was a slaveholder and despised abolitionists. At one point, he earned the nickname "Hangman Foote" when he threatened on the floor of the Senate that he would personally help with the lynching of Hale if he ever dared to travel to Mississippi. Hale calmly replied that Foote would receive a kind and warm welcome if he ever wanted to visit New Hampshire.

Compromise of 1850

Even though he was quick to fight with others, Foote did not want to see the nation descend into war. Among the politicians in the South, he was one of the few to take a staunch position against the idea of secession. Along with Senators Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Stephen Douglass of Illinois, he became a principal architect of the Compromise of 1850.

This landmark agreement came about following the Mexican War, when the United States acquired the entire northern half of the Mexican Empire. The issue of whether slavery would be permitted in this territory became more pressing when the gold rush of 1849 led to a rapid increase in the population of California, making it eligible to become a state. With the California delegates unequivocally opposed to slavery, there was a strong possibility that the balance between free and slave states in Congress would be upset - potentially prompting the southern states to secede.

Several ideas were proposed in Congress to remedy the California question, along with other issues facing the nation. Foote himself offered a bill in January 1850 to provide territorial governments for California, New Mexico, "Deseret" in Utah, and a new state carved out of western Texas called Jacinto. Henry Clay, a longstanding Kentucky senator who had earned the nickname "The Great Compromiser" for his role in negotiating the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and Tariff Compromise of 1833, offered eight resolutions related to the former Mexican territory.

Henry Clay delivers a speech on his compromise proposals (Source)

President Zachary Taylor wanted the issue of California's admission as a state to be referred to the Senate Committee on Territories. Foote suggested that it go before a special 13-man committee, along with the other proposals suggested by Clay, so they could be brought before Congress in a single bill. Clay, who had intended to have his proposals considered separately, gave Foote's suggestion what would be a lasting nickname: an "omnibus bill," after the horse-drawn conveyance that was becoming popular for urban transportation. Clay worried that his proposals would be shot down if they were bundled together, declaring that Foote's proposal put into an omnibus "all sorts of things and every kind of passenger, and myself among them."

Foote, in turn, charged that Clay was "throwing into the hands of his adversaries all the trump cards in the deck." In other words, he considered that Clay's proposals benefited the North while offering little in return to the South. "My allegiance is to this Union and to my state," Clay rebutted, "but if gentlemen suppose they can exact from me an acknowledgement of allegiance to any ideal or future contemplated confederacy of the South, I here declare that I owe no allegiance to it; nor will I, for one, come under any such allegiance if I can avoid it."

The issues on the table were so weighty that many senators wondered whether the Union could be preserved. Senators like Foote felt that California's admission into the Union would provoke the South into secession, but that it would be possible to preserve the nation if the northern states made a number of concessions in exchange for California statehood. However, many of his constituents in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South were actively calling for secession. Then on March 4, Senator John C. Calhoun expressed his thoughts on the issues facing the nation.

Calhoun was a much respected member of the Senate. During his long political career, he had served four terms in the House of Representatives, acted as Secretary of War in President James Monroe's Cabinet, and been elected Vice President to President John Quincy Adams. He had served in the Senate since 1832, with a brief hiatus to join President John Tyler's cabinet as Secretary of State.

By the time the 1850 measures appeared before the Senate, Calhoun was 67 years old suffering from severe illness. He was so weak that he could not deliver his own address (it was read by Senator James M. Mason of Virginia) but there was no mistaking that his words were a rallying cry for southern sectionalism. Calhoun declared that the equilibrium between the North and South had broken down, with the northern states having "exclusive power of controlling the government, which leaves the [South] without any adequate means of protecting itself against its encroachment and oppression."

Calhoun suggested that the North had excluded the South from newly acquired territories and placed an undue tax burden on the region, appropriating most of the proceeds to northern manufacturing interests. This industry, he argued, made the North a more popular destination for immigrants and consequently increased these states' power in national elections. He said relations between the North and South had been further strained by abolitionists' fervent denunciations of slavery. If the state of affairs continued, he suggested, the South would have no choice but to secede.

The Senate should not be discussing any sort of compromise, Calhoun concluded. Rather, the North needed to concede equal right to the territories acquired in the Mexican War, work to return fugitive slaves to their owners, "cease the agitation of the slave question," and establish a constitutional amendment to restore the South to equal power in the government.

"At all events, the responsibility for saving the Union rests on the North, and not the South," Calhoun declared. "The South cannot save it by any act of hers, and the North may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the Constitution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice."

Foote was appalled by the address, believing the course demanded by Calhoun would make secession "almost inevitable." Not only was Calhoun obstructing a compromise, he charged, but he was "heard to denounce the very name of compromise." He also wondered why Calhoun had not consulted with other southern senators before making his speech. "To speak plainly, I almost felt that a noose was put around my neck, while asleep, and without having antecedingly obtained my consent," he complained.

Calhoun showed little regard for Foote's concerns. About 10 days after his address, he said, "Well sir, I never did consult any man upon any speech I ever made. I make speeches for myself."

The fiery speech was one of the last ones Calhoun would make. He died on March 31.

Feud with Benton

By the time of Calhoun's death, Foote had been openly disdainful of Senator Thomas Hart Benton for several months. A Democrat from Missouri, Benton and Foote agreed on many issues. However, Foote despised what he saw as Benton's pompous attitude. "On meeting him face to face my first unfavorable impressions of him were greatly strengthened,and the excessive vanity and egotism constantly displayed by him, both in conversational scenes and in the Senate, inspired me with feelings of disgust and aversion which I have seldom experienced," he wrote in his autobiography.

In December 1849, Foote had essentially accused Benton of stealing his proposal for territorial governments in the new lands taken in the Mexican War. He said the Missouri senator had used language "of the coarsest scurrility and envenomed abuse," and insinuated that Benton had inspired slaves to flee Missouri for freedom in Illinois. Benton, a slaveholder himself, had once been prone to violent outbursts but had cooled down considerably after killing a man in a duel in 1817. He responded to Foote's harangue by simply walking out of the chamber.

It was only the start of a prolonged bullying campaign against Benton. In one particularly fierce rant, Foote accused him of colluding with Senator William Henry Seward, a New York abolitionist who would become President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State, to undermine the power of the southern states. He also said Benton had conspired with England to sabotage the peace with Mexico and supported California statehood because his son-in-law John C. Fremont would likely become one of the state's senators. Foote even criticized the "imposing nasality" of Benton's Missouri accent. On February 20, 1850, he accused Benton of being motivated by "an intense self-love" and said the senator wouldn't hesitate to sabotage the Union for personal gain.

The relationship between the two men was further frayed by Benton's opposition to the omnibus compromise bill, which he dubbed a "monster." When Benton joined the debate on March 28, Foote ridiculed him as "the Caesar, the Napoleon of the Senate." Benton protested that such personal attacks were in violation of the Senate's rules of decorum, but Foote wouldn't let up. He accused Benton of "parading himself as the peculiar friend and champion of California." Referencing the elopement of Benton's daughter Jessie with Fremont, he suggested that the Missouri senator wanted to "drag California into the Union before her wedding garment has been cast about her person." Foote said that if Benton was truly aggrieved by his insults, he could demand satisfaction through a duel.

"I pronounce it cowardly to give insults where they cannot be chastised. Can I take a cudgel to him here?" Benton responded. "Is a senator to be blackguarded here in the discharge of his duty, and the culprit go unpunished?" Vice President Millard Fillmore, presiding over the Senate session, ignored Foote's attacks and ruled that Benton's remarks were out of order.

Curiously, Fillmore regretted the lack of civility in the Senate during a funeral held in the chamber for Calhoun just six days later. He said the Vice President was once the only person who could declare a senator out of order for their behavior, but that Calhoun had modified the rules while he was Vice President to allow senators to better police their own behavior. However, Fillmore said he didn't think the Senate had been doing enough to foster a friendly environment. "A slight attack, or even an insinuation, of a personal character, often provokes a more severe retort, which brings out a more disorderly reply, each senator feeling a justification in the previous aggression," he said.

The remark foresaw the inevitable clash between Benton and Foote. This incident was likely spurred by remarks over the recently departed Calhoun; indeed, Benton had declared that the former Vice President "died with treason in his heart and on his lips," firing up secessionists across the South before passing away. On April 17, the two men got into a heated argument in the Senate, with Foote bringing up the insinuation that Benton had been taking bribes.

After months of insults, Benton had finally reached a breaking point. He angrily rose from his seat and stormed toward Foote, who immediately retreated into the aisle and drew a pistol. Bedlam erupted in the chamber as other senators tried to prevent any violence. Though Benton's words vary from source to source, their meaning remains constant: he was unarmed, Foote intended to kill him, and he was welcome to commit such a cowardly murder. According to one source, Benton threw open his shirt front and declared, "Let him fire! Stand out of the way! I have no pistols. Let the assassin fire!"

Thomas Hart Benton dares Henry S. Foote to shoot him. (Source)

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Foote surrendered the weapon to Senator Daniel Dickinson of New York, who locked it in his desk. Benton continued to shout at Foote, accusing him of making an assassination attempt. Foote denied the charge, saying he had started carrying the pistol for self-defense after being threatened by another senator in a cloakroom a few days earlier.

Preceding the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks by six years, the incident was a potent illustration of just how fraught the tensions between the North and South were. Some senators demanded that Foote be expelled, and a resolution was quickly introduced to investigate the incident. When no one wanted to serve on it, Fillmore had to name seven members.

In July, the committee concluded that the confrontation between Foote and Benton was like nothing that had ever occurred before in the Senate. Although the senators agreed that Foote had "indulged in personalities toward Mr. Benton of the most offensive character, such as were calculated to rouse the fiercest resentment in the human bosom," they also concluded that Foote had been acting in self-defense when he drew a pistol. The committee recommended no further action, hoping the incident would provide "a sufficient rebuke and warning not unheeded in the future."

Governor of Mississippi

Initially opposed to the omnibus strategy, Clay had announced on April 8 that he would support it. "You may vote against it if you please in toto, because of the bad there is in it, or you may vote for it because you approve of the greater amount of good there is in it," he said.

Foote continued to support the compromise, denouncing an alternate measure offered by Davis as nothing but "a sort of southern Wilmot Proviso." Davis's proposal called for the federal protection of slavery in the territories, but Foote argued that this measure would actually help undermine slavery. Since those in favor of slavery had traditionally argued that the practice was constitutionally protected everywhere except the free states, he said, it was an accepted notion that Congress had no authority to legislate on slavery issues. He said that if Davis's measure was adopted, it could quickly lead to abolition and "utterly exterminate our favorite domestic institution, and plunge the whole South in hopeless and remediless ruin."

The omnibus bill called for the admission of California into the Union as a free state and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., in exchange for a stronger fugitive slave law and the possible expansion of slavery into the West through popular sovereignty. When this legislation was voted down, Foote tried unsuccessfully to have California divided into two states, one slave and one free. This proposal was voted down with 33 opposed and 23 in favor.

Despite these failures, the Compromise of 1850 still made it through Congress. Stephen Douglas of Illinois resumed the effort to pass the measures as five separate bills, which covered all of the issues in the omnibus and had Texas surrender its claims on New Mexico territory. Foote frequently visited the House of Representatives after the measures passed the Senate, offering assistance to members there.

Foote was the only man among all of Mississippi's representatives and senators to support the Compromise of 1850. After the close of the congressional session in September, the state legislature commended Davis and the four congressmen for their opposition to the measures. It also censured Foote for his support.

Despite this rebuke, there was a fair amount of support in Mississippi for the preservation of the Union. In 1851, Foote was selected as the gubernatorial candidate for the newly formed Union Party to counter pro-secession Democratic candidate John Quitman. The bitter campaign was chiefly focused on whether or not Mississippi should quit the Union; at one campaign stop in Sledgeville, Foote and Quitman came to blows and had to be separated. Quitman delayed his schedule to stop in towns two days after Foote, and Foote subsequently began accusing Quitman of being afraid to meet him face to face.

John Quitman, who dropped out of the gubernatorial race against Foote (Source)

Quitman soon dropped out of the race, and the Democrats chose Davis to take his place. In the general election, Foote squeaked out a narrow victory, earning 999 more votes than Davis out of 57,717 cast. He resigned from the Senate on January 8, 1852, to begin his term as governor.

Secession was still the main issue of the day, and Foote found little support in the Democratic legislature. These members named a Whig to fill Foote's seat in the Senate and a former Union Democrat to fill the vacancy left by Davis, then postponed the election for a senator who was to start serving in 1854. Foote also tried to get the legislature to formally support the Compromise of 1850, but its members stubbornly refused to do so.

In 1853, Mississippi voters chose secessionist candidate John J. McRae for governor. Frustrated by the mood in his state, Foote resigned five days before the expiration of his term; state senate president John J. Pettus held the office for these last days. One year later, Foote moved to California.

Snubbed in California

Although he renounced any political ambition in his new home, Foote soon became strongly involved with the Know Nothing party. At the 1855 state elections, this nativist movement gained a 3-1 majority in the state assembly and a one-vote advantage in the state senate.

In a June 1855 speech, Foote decried the continuing sectional tensions in the United States as the "most hazardous crisis that had ever risen in our national affairs demanded the serious consideration of the patriot, and every lover of his country." He worried that "fanatics" in both the North and South threatened to tear the country asunder. The best solution, he believed, was to have Whigs and Democrats opposed to Democratic President Franklin Pierce unite in a party dedicated to the good of the entire nation.

Although he claimed that he was no longer interested in being a politician, Foote was one of the top people considered for the Know Nothings' Senate nomination. However, he was soon dealt a black eye when he engaged in an unnecessary quarrel with the Sacremento Union, a Whig newspaper that had backed the Know Nothings in 1855. When the paper denounced the party's Senate candidates as "gaming politicians" and "migratory partisan quacks," Foote took offense and said the publication shouldn't be speaking in generalities. The Union accepted the challenge, publishing an article outlining the reasons why Foote shouldn't be considered for office. These included his inability to work well with others, "impolitic acts" such as the confrontation with Benton, and his brief time in California.

The last reason was particularly galling to state senator Wilson G. Flint, a Know Nothing who hated slaveholders and considered Foote a carpetbagger. While the state assembly voted 57-19 on January 11, 1856, to meet four days later to elect a U.S. senator, Flint joined a 17-15 vote to postpone the joint meeting to January 22. When this day arrived, he threw his support behind a motion to postpone the election of a senator indefinitely. These actions negated the Know Nothings' one-vote majority, and the Senate seat remained vacant until the next year.

Foote remained loyal to the Know Nothings, who supported Filmore for President in the 1856 election. When both the nation and California supported Democratic nominee James Buchanan, the Know Nothing party in California disintegrated. Foote subsequently rejoined the Democrats, but took no active role in the 1857 election.

In July, Foote announced that he would be traveling to Washington, D.C. in September to attend a session of the Supreme Court. Although the implication was that he would only be there for a brief period, he never came back to California. Instead, he returned to Mississippi and settled near Vicksburg. Critics charged that this action confirmed their suspicions that Foote had only been interested in fulfilling his political ambitions in California.

Nevertheless, most of Foote's children remained in the state and several became prominent in the West. Henry S. Foote Jr. became a California superior court judge, while another son, W.W. Foote, was a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to the Senate in 1892. His son-in-law William M. Stewart settled in Nevada, where he was named by the Republicans as one of the first senators from this state.

William M. Stewart, Foote's son-in-law, riding a mule in Nevada (Source)

The "open assailant"

Foote remained in Mississippi only briefly, opting to move when it became clear that the state was going to secede. He settled near Nashville, Tennessee, and was a delegate to the Southern convention in Knoxville. He supported Northern Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas in the contentious 1860 election, agreeing with the Illinois senator's proposal to preserve the Union through popular sovereignty.

Even though he had opposed secession throughout his career, Foote supported the Confederacy after Tennessee left the Union in June 1861. The state was one of four to secede after the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in April, kicking off the Civil War. By this point, Foote said, to oppose secession in the South was to be labeled a "coward and submissionist" and possibly exposed to intimidation and violence. Moreover, his family supported the cause, with his sons serving in the Confederate military.

Foote returned to politics, getting elected as a Tennessee representative to the First and Second Confederate Congresses and starting his service in 1862. In his first term, he chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs as well as a special committee to investigate illegal arrests and losses on the battlefield. In his second term, he chaired another special committee on illegal impressment.

The relationship between Foote and Davis, now President of the Confederacy, had not improved. Foote became known for his harsh criticism of Davis's administration and his handling of the war. He constantly demanded information on military movements and battles, advocated an offensive rather than defensive war against the Union, and ordered some 30 inquiries into suspected ineptitude and corruption. Foote was particularly suspicious of quartermasters, whom he suspected of reaping private profits through the supply of the Confederate military.

In addition to his disdain for Davis, Foote held little regard for the members of his administration. He managed to oust Judah Benjamin as Secretary of War after introducing a vote of no confidence against him in 1862. While this action followed the loss of Roanoke Island in North Carolina as well as losses in the western states of the Confederacy, it was also influenced at least in part by anti-Semitism. At one point, Foote ranted that Jews had "deluged" the Confederacy and taken over important trades; he said that if this alleged shadowy influence continued, they would "probably find nearly all the property of the Confederacy in the hands of Jewish shylocks." He later declared that he would not support the creation of a Confederate Supreme Court as long as Benjamin "shall continue to pollute the ears of majesty Davis with his insidious counsels."

Benjamin wasn't Foote's only target. He claimed that his critiques of Confederate Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Memminger and Secretary of War James Seddon, along with his call for them to be removed from office, had influenced the men's resignations. He called Commissary General Lucius B. Northrop "a curse to the country" after learning that Northern prisoners of war were not getting enough food. At one point, Foote introduced an amendment to limit Davis's presidential powers but it failed with 45 against and 14 in favor.

Foote's opposition to Davis became so protracted that the Confederate president described him as his "only open assailant in Congress." Foote was against secret sessions of the Confederate Congress, conscription efforts and, the suspension of habeas corpus (unless the enemy was within sight of Richmond). He opposed the continuation of the war after Lincoln offered peace terms in 1863 and 1864, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce his own measures to stop the conflict.

Not surprisingly, Foote was as unpopular in the Confederate Congress as he had been in the U.S. Senate. One newspaper commented that he was a "verbose talker, a loose and inaccurate thinker" who "talks about every thing; and to little purpose." In one incident, Representative Edmund S. Dargan of Alabama attacked him with a Bowie knife during a debate after Foote called him a "damned rascal." When others stopped Dargan and took the knife away, Foote, perhaps recalling Benton's words, proclaimed, "I defy the steel of the assassin!"

Foote also got into a scuffle with Northrop and Representative Thomas B. Hanly of Missouri after laughing at Hanly's testimony during a committee hearing. John Mitchell, an Irish patriot and exile who had joined the staff of the Richmond Examiner, was so incensed by Foote's disrespect that he sent William G. Swan of Tennessee to deliver a duel challenge. When Foote responded that he would not accept the challenge because Swan was no gentleman, Swan responded by striking him with an umbrella, leaving a gash on Foote's head.

Expulsion

On Christmas Eve, 1864, Foote wrote to the Speaker of the House to say that he intended to resign at the end of the year. Shortly thereafter, he departed for the United States with his wife Rachel. He was reportedly heading for Washington, D.C., on an unauthorized trip to present a peace plan to Lincoln. Foote never completed the journey; he was arrested on January 10, 1865, although Rachel was allowed to proceed since her passport was in order.

Some of Foote's fellow representatives, perhaps tired of Foote's antics in the Confederate Congress, urged Davis to allow him to leave the South. Instead, a special committee was set up and decided by one vote to return Foote to Richmond. He spoke in his own defense on January 19, arguing that the arrest had violated his rights.

The Committee on Elections took up the issue, and recommended that Foote be thrown out of the Confederate Congress. Its report stated that he had tried to go to the U.S. capital without permission, intended to resign but withdrew his letter after his failed mission, and was "guilty of conduct incompatible with his duty and station as a member of the Congress of the Confederate States." The committee's minority report suggested that he had an honest motive, but that his actions were still "highly reprehensible" and deserving of censure.

The vote taken on January 24 was 51-25 in favor of Foote's expulsion. While this was more than two-thirds of the congressmen present, there were 33 members who were absent. Since the Confederate Constitution held that a congressman could only be expelled by a two-thirds vote of the entire membership, the motion failed. Instead, the Confederate Congress voted 64-6 to adopt the minority report and censure Foote.

Just one week later, Foote was arrested again. This time, he had made it to the United States and sheltered with his son-in-law William M. Stewart, the senator from Nevada. U.S. authorities gave Foote the option of returning to the South or going abroad. He chose the latter, leaving for England in February 1865. While there, he issued a manifesto calling on the Tennessee delegation to secede from the Confederacy and rejoin the Union.

Foote's actions earned him the nickname "Vallandingham of the South," a reference to the deportation of Clement Vallandigham, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, to the Confederacy after his vocal opposition to the Civil War. On February 27, the Confederate Congress again took up the question of whether to expel Foote. Declaring that his actions had indicated a disavowal of the Confederacy and a renunciation of his duties as a congressmen, the vote was 73-0 in favor.

After just six weeks in London, Foote returned to the United States. He was again taken into custody and held in New York City. On May 1, Foote wrote to President Andrew Johnson and asked that he be allowed to go to the Pacific coast, to be with his family and "spend the evening of his days in quietude and repose." Johnson was unsympathetic; he ordered Foote to leave the United States within 48 hours or be charged with treason.

Foote went abroad once more, this time to Montreal. But on May 15, he said he was willing to come back to the United States and face whatever jury trial Johnson deemed fit. He reminded Johnson of how they have served together in Congress and noted his longstanding opposition to secession before the Civil War. "It has been my fate to be grossly misjudged and misrepresented by men of extreme views, both in the North and in the South," he complained.

On June 30, Foote asked for a presidential pardon. Johnson was not amenable to this request, but on August 26 he allowed Foote to return to the U.S. Rather than face criminal charges, he would simply have to take an oath and give his parole of honor. Foote arrived in New York City in December.

Later years

After settling in Nashville, Foote moved to Washington, D.C. and began practicing law. He also started writing for a newspaper and completed more books, including Bar of the South and the Southwest and an autobiography entitled Casket of Reminiscences.

While praising President Ulysses S. Grant's inaugural address in 1869, Foote supported his opponent Horace Greeley (the candidate of the Democrats and Liberal Republicans) in 1872. Foote transitioned to the Republicans in 1876, supporting candidate Rutherford B. Hayes.

Foote was subject to political restrictions under the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred those who had served in the U.S. government and then joined the Confederacy from seeking office. However, his privileges were restored in 1869. After Hayes became President, he appointed Foote as superintendent of the U.S. Mint at New Orleans. Foote held this post from 1878 until his death on May 20, 1880.


Sources: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, National Governors Association, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, "Clay's Last Compromise" on Senate.gov, "Bitter Feelings in the Senate Chamber" on Senate.gov, "Henry S. Foote's Duels" in the Chicago Tribune on Aug. 31 1873, The Overland Monthly, Foote Family and Genealogy by Abram W. Foote, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress, Confederate Incognito: The Civil War Reports of "Long Grabs" a.k.a. Murdoch John McSween 26th and 35th North Carolina Infantry edited by E.B. Munson, At the Edge of Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union by Robert V. Remini, America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union by Fergus M. Bordewich, Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr., On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History by John C. Waugh, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards, The American Senate: An Insider's History by Neil MacNeil and Richard A. Baker, Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War by David J. Eicher, Leaders of the American Civil War: A Biographical and Historiographical Dictionary edited by Charles F. Ritter and Jon L. Wakelyn, Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction by James Alex Baggett, The Confederate States of America 1861-1865: A History of the South by E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate Congress by Wildred Buck Yearns, Encyclopedia of Mississippi by Nancy Capace, The Journal of Southern History Vol. 9, Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America Vol. VII, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Letters of Warren Akin: Confederate Congressman, Arkansas: A Narrative History by Jeannie M. Wayne, Casket of Reminiscences by Henry S. Foote