These signatures are from an album compiled by William E. Kettles, who as a young man worked at a telegraph station across from the White House during the Civil War. In 1865 Kettles received the telegraph that Richmond had fallen. It is believed that Kettles likely acquired at least some of the autographs by requesting them from those who came to the telegraph station.  Later in life Kettles gifted the album to a friend, and it remained in that family until sold at auction in 2015.

Issued to “W.E. Kettles,” dated “March 13^th-1868.” Printed yellow card,  4.75 x 3”, mounted on white card backing, 5.125 x x 4.” Fine condition. Impeachment proceedings against Johnson begun in March 1868, failed in late May, with the U.S. Senate falling one vote short of conviction. Superb presidential collectible. In protective sleeve.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Andrew Johnson, a senator from Tennessee, was the only U.S. senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864 he was elected vice president of the United States. Sworn in as president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, President Johnson enacted a lenient Reconstruction policy for the defeated South. The Republican-dominated Congress greatly opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction program and in March 1867 passed the Tenure of Office Act over the president’s veto. The bill prohibited the president from removing officials confirmed by the Senate without senatorial approval and was designed to shield members of Johnson’s Cabinet like Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had been a leading Republican radical in the Lincoln administration. In the fall of 1867, President Johnson attempted to test the constitutionality of the act by replacing Stanton with General Ulysses S. Grant. However, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to rule on the case, and Grant turned the office back to Stanton after the Senate passed a measure in protest of the dismissal.

On February 21, 1868, Johnson decided to rid himself of Stanton once and for all and appointed General Lorenzo Thomas, an individual far less favorable to the Congress than Grant, as secretary of war. Stanton refused to yield, barricading himself in his office, and the House of Representatives, which had already discussed impeachment after Johnson’s first dismissal of Stanton, initiated formal impeachment proceedings against the president. On February 24, Johnson was impeached, and on March 13 his impeachment trial began in the Senate under the direction of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. The trial ended on May 26 with Johnson’s opponents narrowly failing to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him.  [jp/sl]

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