“The impeachment of Andrew Johnson, what some called the Ides of March – though it took place in May – was a watershed moment for the United States. Coming amid the continuing aftermath of the Civil War, a legacy which did not smoulder so much as fiercely burn, his apparent overthrow would change everything. The charges laid before him were petty and vindictive, and they nearly destroyed the position of the presidency altogether; some senators wondered if perhaps it would be wiser to have the role be a merely symbolic figurehead while Congress selected the head of government. It would have been an arrangement that accepted the idea that the British parliamentary system was superior. Such an admission was beyond the pale, and the abolition of the presidency never materialised. This was good fortune for the 18th man to occupy the position. Benjamin Wade had previously been the Senate president pro tempore, and impeachment had now catapulted him into the role of being the most radical man to call the presidency his. An ardent support of women’s suffrage and full equality for African Americans, this surly former Erie Canal labourer was the South’s worst nightmare. With the presidential election just a few short months away, Wade wasted no time in making his mark. He made it his goal to tear to pieces the conciliatory Reconstruction policies of Johnson and Lincoln, and punish the perpetrators of the Confederacy and of the Civil War. The 1860s had seen civil war start and finish, the assassination of a president, the impeachment of another, and the emergence of its most radical. It was a busy ten years.”
- Y. Johnson, An Analysis of the Presidency (Hamilton Publishing Inc.), p.88.
“By presidential order, the Commission on National Justice was formed to hunt down Jefferson Davis, who remained under indictment while sheltering in Quebec and would soon be smuggled back into the U.S. to face trial and hanging. The daring mission to kidnap him from the British territory was fabulously portrayed in the 1977 film The Man Has Three Eyes. Soon the commission would be subsumed into the Secret Service and turned onto former slavers and traitors across the South in a vast hunt which obliterated the middle ranks of the Democratic Party in some places. So it was that employees of the Department of the Treasury, under the Secret Service, became a secret police force to comb through the South. Today, the Secret Service is no longer politicised – so it says, at least – and is the premier federal law enforcement agency. But its beginnings were far murkier. Though its colourful history includes such wild stories as the agents who became the first to police the most lawless parts of the West to the all-out war against the Mafia, it all began as a tool to destroy political opponents.”
- B. Bradshaw, The Concise History of American Institutions (University of Chicago Press), p.221.
“The nomination of Ulysses Grant very nearly ripped the Republican Party asunder. The Radical Republicans were incensed that the nomination had been ‘stolen’ from President Wade and 1868 seemed poised to mark the end of the party itself just as it seemed to be riding at its highest. But at the urging of party bosses, Grant made Benjamin Wade his running mate and it seemed that for once the radical Wade was willing to accept that at least one compromise was needed to keep the Republican Party – the only hope for African Americans – intact. The very brief Wade presidency would end less than a year after it had begun when Ulysses Grant ascended to the role, but its shortness did not diminish its legacy. The Radical Republicans had a newfound power, and would ensure that civil rights and the de-confederisation of the South continued unabated.”
- H. Patel, Ulysses Grant: A Life (Harvard University Press), p.273.
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