The gallery was noisy, demonstrative, divided by partisanship. Some spectators whistled and waved handkerchiefs when the impeachment managers, seven men from the House, including old Thad with wig askew, took their places amid piles of books and briefs at a table to the left of the chair. President Johnson's five eminent attorneys faced them on the other side of the chair. All of the senators were squeezed into the first two rows of desks, with the desks behind packed with members of the House. Reporters filled the back aisles, lined the wall, and blocked the doors.
The trial opened with a three-hour oration by the chief manager, Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts. Spoons Butler, the Beast of New Orleans, was a skilled and abrasive lawyer. He generated cheers and a blizzard of waving handkerchiefs when he declared that Johnson was patently guilty for removing Stanton in defiance of Congress and while Congress was in session.
Seated in the restless, noisy crowd, Virgilia gazed down on Sam Stout and felt no great hurt, only a melancholy emptiness. Time was indeed changing and mellowing her. To her surprise, her attention wandered several times from the scene below. In its place she saw Scipio Brown's eyes after he'd saved her from injury when the market cart overturned. She remembered how his hands had felt on her waist, pressing tightly. She liked the memory.
By the ninth of April, the managers had rested their case. Perhaps the high point of the prosecution's presentation had come when Butler whipped out a red-stained garment and flourished it. He said it was the shirt of an Ohioan from the Freedmen's Bureau whom Klansmen in Mississippi had flogged. Next morning Washington had a new phrase for its political lexicon; you whipped up anti-Southern sentiment by "waving the bloody shirt."
Johnson's lawyers presented the arguments for acquittal. Because of an epidemic of measles at the orphanage, Virgilia missed many of those sessions in April. When she read about them in the papers, she didn't regret it. The legalisms, the hair-splitting over the language of the Constitution, and the all-day orations sounded boring.
She wondered why long speeches were necessary. The issue seemed clear enough. Johnson's authority had been challenged by the various Reconstruction bills, including the provocative Tenure of Office Act, which effectively denied the Chief Executive the power to remove cabinet officers whom the Senate had confirmed. On this issue Johnson had dug in, to force a test.
Virgilia thought that that was not only valid but also necessary. Further, Edwin Stanton was Lincoln's appointee, not Johnson's, and it was in Lincoln's term, not Johnson's, that the Senate had consented to the appointment. She thought there was a strong argument that Stanton was actually outside the Tenure of Office jurisdiction.
Lengthy summations began. She heard the one by William S. Groesbeck, an eloquent Cincinnati attorney. He spoke to the subject of Johnson's character.
"He is a patriot. He may be full of error, but he loves his country. I have often said that those who lived in the North, safely distant from the war, knew little of it. We who lived on the border knew more ... our horizon was always red with its flames, and it sometimes burned so near we could feel its heat on our outstretched hands. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee lived in the heart of the conflagration ... in the very furnace of war ... and his tempered strength kept him steadfastly loyal to the Union ... impervious to treason. How can he then be suddenly transformed, in the words of the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Boutwell, to the arch-demon? It is ludicrous."
At the managers' table, George S. Boutwell glared.
On and on they went, accusing, defending, interpreting, theorizing. Occasionally fist fights broke out in the gallery, and the trial would be stopped while ushers removed the combatants. The atmosphere in the gilt-and-marble chamber grew more and more charged with emotion, until Virgilia began to feel she was no longer in the United States, but in some Roman arena. The difference was that the victim to be sacrificed had not made even a single appearance. Johnson had organized a staff of runners to report each new development.
The Roman analogy proved especially apt the day the Honorable Mr. Williams, manager from Pennsylvania, attacked the accused:
"If you acquit him you affirm all his imperial pretensions and decide that no amount of usurpation will ever be enough to bring a chief magistrate to justice. That will be a victory over all of you here assembled. A victory to celebrate the exultant ascent of Andrew Johnson to the Capitol, dragging not captive kings but a captive Senate at his chariot wheels."
Men jumped up in the gallery, some cheering, some protesting. Chief Justice Chase needed four minutes to restore order. Virgilia saw faces red with indignation, and she saw others that made her think of predators — predators who fed on every accusation, no matter how outrageous.
Suddenly, on the far side of the gallery, she was startled to spy two other faces overlooked before. Her brother Stanley and his wife Isabel.
Virgilia no longer had contact with them; no invitations to dine at I Street, no birthday greetings, nothing. She often heard Stanley's name in the city, sometimes not in a flattering way.
Isabel glanced at Virgilia with no recognition. Stanley was absorbed in matters on the floor. How puffy he looked, Virgilia thought. Older than his forty-five years. His skin had an unhealthy, jaundiced coloration.
Williams eyed the quieting gallery. He raised his voice:
"If indeed the miscreant returns like a conqueror in Roman triumph, I can predict what will follow. A return of the Rebel office-holders whom he favors, and a general convulsion of their states, casting loose your reconstruction laws, and delivering over the whole theater of past conflict into anarchy, injustice, and ruin."
Again members of the crowd surged up, yelling and waving handkerchiefs. Virgilia sat in sad silence. In her view the managers had proved nothing, except that they wanted Johnson's blood before he ever came to trial, and would have it whether he was guilty or not.
The session recessed. On the packed staircase, Virgilia came upon Stanley leaning against the wall and mopping his yellowish face with a large kerchief. She stopped on the step above, trying to shield him from the buffeting crowd.
"Stanley?" she said over the noise. She tugged his sleeve. "I saw you earlier. Are you all right?"
"Virgilia. Oh — yes, perfectly fine." He seemed remote, eyeing the people pushing past her down the stairs. "And you?"
"Well enough. But I'm worried about you, Stanley. You look ill. It's been so long since we talked, and there are so many unkind stories afloat."
"Stories?" He jerked back like a felon threatened with handcuffs. "What sort of stories?"
She smelled the clove he'd chewed. To hide what other odor? "Stories about the things you do to hurt yourself. Great long drinking sprees —"
"Lies." He leaned his sweaty forehead against the marble, gasping. "Damn lies."
Grieving for him, and for his own lie, she touched his sleeve. "I hope so. You're a prominent man, enormously wealthy and successful. You have everything now."
"Perhaps I don't deserve it. Perhaps I'm not proud of what I am. Did you ever think of that?"
The blurted words stunned her. Stanley guilt-ridden? Why?
From behind, someone seized her shoulder. Virgilia was nearly toppled off balance; if she'd fallen, those pouring from the gallery might have trampled her.
Not four inches from Virgilia's nose, Isabel's long, horselike face seemed to inflate with rage. "Leave him alone, you mongrel slut. Stanley is tired, that's all. We have nothing to say to you. Stand aside."