Read Online Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro - Free Book Online

counts to the Senate; the resolution was presented as a strictly party measure, and, in the 73–32 vote, not a Republican voted against it. Two-thirds—twenty-three votes—of the thirty-four in the Senate were necessary for conviction, and twenty-five of the senators were Republicans; even if no Federalist voted against Chase, there would be enough votes to give Jefferson his conviction. A tide of public opinion, backed by presidential power, was sweeping the country.
    And then, in the trial of Samuel Chase, that tide reached the Senate.
    During the week-long trial, attended by foreign ambassadors and high federal officials while, before the row of thirty-four senators, Chase and his attorneys, among the most distinguished in the nation, sat in one box, the impeachment’s “managers” from the House in another, a lot of words were spoken—the testimony filled over six hundred pages in the
Annals of Congress
, forerunner of the
Congressional Record
—and some went to the point. One of Chase’s attorneys, Robert Goodloe Harper, appealed for sympathy for the “aged patriot” who after years of service to his country “is arraigned as an offender…. Placed at the bar of the court, after having sat with honor for sixteen years on the bench, he is doomed to hear the most opprobrious epithets applied to his name, by those whose predecessors were accustomed to look up at him with admiration and respect…. His footsteps are hunted from place to place, to find indiscretions, which may be exaggerated into crimes.” But Harper also appealed to principle, telling the senators that impeachment should not be employed against a judge, or any official, just because he held opinions contrary to those of the party in power. “Justice, ’tho it may be an inconvenient restraint on our power, while we are strong, is the only rampart behind which we can find protection when we become weak,” he said. That principle was of course the one that had been so prominent in motivating the Founding Fathers to create a Senate—that the rights of a minority must be protected against the tyranny of the majority—and that principle was reaffirmed, not just by Federalist senators but by Republican senators, and not by just a handful of Republican senators, either. One Federalist, Uriah Tracy of Connecticut, ill with pneumonia, left his bed and was carried to his seat because Chase’s supporters believed that every vote would be needed. They were wrong—as was shown by the very first vote cast by a Republican senator on the first article of impeachment. The vote, by Stephen Bradley of Vermont, was “Not guilty.” So were the votes of ten other Republicans; the final tally on the first article was 18 to 16 against conviction. For two hours each article of impeachment was read separately, and each senator then voted, and on each count enough Republicans voted “not guilty” to prevent a conviction. Despite the power of a President (all during the trial, senators had filed into the White House for dinner and private conversation), and despite the pressure of a party, and the roar of public opinion (and their own anger at Chase’s partisan words, drummed into their ears over andover that week by the House prosecutors), on not one of the counts were the Republicans able to muster the necessary twenty-three votes.
    The man who presided over the trial understood the historic significance of the scene that had been acted out before him. At the time he was presiding, Vice President Burr was under indictment for fatally wounding Alexander Hamilton, and three days after the trial, he would leave Washington for the Southwest, where he would shortly become embroiled in the shadowy intrigues that would becloud his memory. But the Senate seemed to bring out the best in him; attempting before the trial to ensure Burr’s loyalty to the Republican cause, President Jefferson, who had once called him “a crooked gun, or other perverted machine,” offered