The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by Robert S. Levine

Author:Robert S. Levine [Levine, Robert S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 19th Century, political science, Political Process, General, American Government, Executive Branch
ISBN: 9781324004769
Google: mQYDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:36.157524+00:00

The Freedmen’s Bureau Redux

The various bills passed by Congress in February and March 1867 threw Johnson into a righteous fury about what he perceived as the overstepping of the legislative branch. He vetoed the Tenure of Office Act on the grounds that “the power of removal is constitutionally vested in the President of the United States,” and he made similar constitutional arguments when he vetoed the Reconstruction Acts.6 In his anger at Congress’s overriding of his vetoes, Johnson turned his attention to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, as a result of the Reconstruction Acts, had gained an even greater role in monitoring the interactions of the freedpeople with southern whites. The Freedmen’s Bureau had also become part of the command structure of the five military districts, with added juridical authority to create military tribunals. Johnson increasingly saw the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver Otis Howard, as his enemy, and by the summer of 1867 wanted him gone, along with any military commander sympathetic to Radical Reconstruction and the workings of the bureau.

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