History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, by the House of Representatives, and his trial by the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors in office, 1868Ross, Edmund G. (Edmund Gibson)
History
History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, by the House of Representatives, and his trial by the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors in office, 1868
Ross, Edmund G. (Edmund Gibson)
Johnson, Andrew, 1808-1875 -- Impeachment
not appointed by the President, we have nothing to say; we leave them
as they heretofore have been. I submit to Senators that this is the
natural, and, having regard to the character of these officers, the
necessary conclusion, that the tenure-of-office of a Secretary here
described is a tenure during the term of service of the President by
whom he was appointed; that it was not the intention of Congress
to compel a President of the United States to continue in office a
Secretary not appointed by himself. * * *
Shortly after this, occurred one of the most amusing and interesting
incidents of the trial. Mr. Boutwell, who was altogether a
matter-of-fact man, though at times indulging in the heroics, ventured,
in the course of his argument, upon a flight of imagination in depicting
the punishment that should be meted out to Mr. Johnson for venturing to
differ with Congress upon the constitutionality of an act of that body.
He said:
Travelers and astronomers inform us that in the Southern heavens, near
the Southern cross, there is a vast space which the uneducated call the
"hole in the sky," where the eye of man, with the aid of the powers
of the telescope, has been unable to discover nebulae, or asteroid, or
comet, or planet, or star, or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark region
of space, which is only known to be less infinite by the evidences of
creation elsewhere, the great author of celestial mechanism has left
the chaos which was in the beginning. If this earth were capable of
the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue which in human mortal
beings are the evidences and pledge of our divine origin and immortal
destiny, it would heave and throb with the energy of the elemental
forces of nature, and project this enemy (referring to President
Johnson) of two races of men into that vast region, there forever
to exist in a solitude eternal as life or as the absence of life,
emblematical of, if not really, that outer darkness of which the Savior
of mankind spoke in warning to those who are enemies to themselves and
of their race and of God.
Mr. Evarts followed Mr. Boutwell, and in the course of his argument
referred to this paragraph in Mr. Boutwell's speech in the following
humorously sarcastic vein, during the delivery of which, the Senate was
repeatedly convulsed with laughter. Mr. Evarts said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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