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Updated: June 19, 2025
It says, in the description which the Act gives of the future tenure-of-office of Secretaries, that a controlling regard is to be had to the fact that the Secretary whose tenure is to be regulated was appointed by some particular President; and during the term of that President he shall continue to hold his office; but as for Secretaries who are in office, not appointed by the President, we have nothing to say; we leave them as they heretofore have been.
The proceedings had on the passage of that bill are inserted at some length here, as a technical knowledge of its history, character and purpose, is essential to a correct apprehension of the controversy that had arisen between the President and Congress. The Tenure-of-Office bill was introduced in the Senate by Mr.
The expenses of the United States, including interest on the public debt, are more than six times as much as they were seven years ago. To collect and disburse this vast amount requires careful supervision as well as systematic vigilance. The system, never perfected, was much disorganized by the "tenure-of-office bill," which has almost destroyed official accountability.
It was freely predicted at the time that so long as the Senate and the President were in political harmony nothing would be heard of the Tenure-of-office Act, but that when the political interests of the Executive should come in conflict with those of the Senate there would be a renewal of the trouble which had characterized the relations of President Johnson and the Senate, and which led to the original Tenure-of-office Act with its positive assertion of senatorial power over the whole question of appointment and removal.
The House had always been jealous of the power of the Senate over appointments to office, and but for the desire to punish President Johnson the representatives would never have consented to the Tenure-of-office Act. They were now determined, if possible, to strip the Senate of its great aggrandizement of power.
On the 9th of March, just five days after Andrew Johnson had left the Presidency, General Butler introduced in the morning hour of the House, a bill of two lines, absolutely repealing the Tenure-of-office Act, for a constructive violation of which he had ten months before urged the impeachment of President Johnson and his expulsion from office.
The Democrats, who had solidly voted against the Tenure-of-office bill two years before, voted now with entire consistency for its repeal, and with them also, in solid ranks, voted the men who, in the preceding Congress, had clamored most loudly for Johnson's decapitation.
But the President ought to have seen and realized that such a step would be altogether foreign to the duty of the Commander of the Army, and that with General Grant's habitual prudence he never could have intended to provoke a controversy with Congress, and get himself entangled in the meshes of the Tenure-of-office Law.
General Butler, another of the House conferees, said: "I am free to say that I think this amendment upon the question of removal and re-instatement of officers leaves the Tenure-of-office Act as though it had never been passed, so far as the power of the President over the Executive officers is concerned."
That the same incumbent was re-elected for the next term is conceded, but I do not comprehend how that fact extended the former term. Entertaining these views, and because the first Article of the Impeachment charges the order of removal as a violation of the Tenure-of-Office Act, I am constrained to hold the President not guilty upon that Article.
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