LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Johnson, Andrew: Congress
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The impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the first of only two Presidents to be impeached in U.S. history -- the second was President William Clinton -- involved complicated issues of law, politics, and personalities. At its heart lay the nearly irreparable relations between Johnson and Congress over which agency of government should oversee Reconstruction. This question of competing authority masked... a more fundamental issue: Congress had instructed the U.S. Army to implement a policy that its commander in chief vehemently opposed. In direct violation of congressional intent and the Command of Army Act, Johnson had used the summer of 1867, when Congress was not in session, to remove several military commanders in favor of officers more supportive of white rule in the South. Later, he tried to create an "Army of the Atlantic," headquartered in the nation's capital, as a means of intimidating his opponents in Congress. Seeing that Johnson was using the Army to play politics and thus endangering the lives of soldiers in the field, Grant turned against the President.
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Before 1960 most historians held the impeachment of Andrew Johnson as a violation of American values regarding division of powers and fair play. Had Johnson been successfully removed from office, he would have been replaced with Radical Republican Benjamin Wade, making the presidency and Congress somewhat uniform in ideology, although in many ways Wade was more "radical" than the Republicans in Congress. This would have established a precedent that a President could be removed not for "high crimes and misdemeanors," but for purely political differences.
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Although not a presidential election, the off-year congressional election of 1866 was in fact a referendum election for Andrew Johnson. By the summer of 1866, Johnson had lost support within the Republican Party for his Reconstruction policies. (See the Domestic Affairs section for details.) After a unity meeting of 7,000 delegates at the National Union Convention -- which met in Philadelphia on August 14 -- failed to bridge the growing gap between Johnson and the Republicans, the determined President decided to take the issue to the people.
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