The bitter division between the Republican
and Democratic parties during and after the Civil War was present on the national and
local scene. Sidney had two weekly newspapers during that time, the Shelby County
Democrat and the Sidney Journal. The papers traded bitter insults throughout
the war, with the Republican-based Journal accusing the Democrat of
traitorous conduct for opposing the war. In a blistering 1868 editorial, the Sidney
Journal accused the Democratic party of "controlling the states of the Rebellion;
giving aid and comfort to the rebels in arms during the war; discouraging enlistments in
the Union army and resisting the draft;" and being responsible for "high taxes,
high prices, and derangement of business, etc."It was in this bitter, heated
environment that the impeachment of President Johnson took place. The rhetoric nationally
was, if anything, worse than on the local scene. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York
Tribune, referred to Johnson as "an aching tooth in the national jaw." As
the frustration grew over the failure of the President to sign laws that the Republican
Radicals pushed through Congress, the invective increased. One Republican representative
called the president "an ungrateful, despicable, besotted traitorous man - an
incubus."
There are some interesting parallels between the Johnson and Clinton impeachment sagas.
Both were born in southern states in relative poverty, raised by a widow, and became a
governor before assuming the Presidency. More than 130 years before Monica Lewinsky became
a household name, a woman named Jennie Perry charged the President Johnson with fathering
her illegitimate son.
Then as now, the issue of the public's right to know about the private life of its
public servants was a topic of discussion. The editor of the Sidney Journal expressed
the opinion of many in the July 3, 1868, edition of the paper. "When a man chooses to
leave the quiet of private life and enter the stormy arena of politics,...he must expect
his public foibles, acts and sayings...will be matters upon which criticism will be
directed." But as to his private life? The editor continued: "A man's private
doings and sayings are his own, and, as long as bounded by a proper respect for the rights
of his fellows, no one has a right to meddle therewith."
As partisan as we believe the 1998 debate in the House of Representatives was, it paled
in comparison to what occurred in the same chamber when our esteemed forefathers were in
charge. Adam Cohen wrote that one representative cried Johnson had dragged the robes of
his office through "the purlieus and filth of treason." Another called the
President's White House staffers "the worst men that ever crawled like filthy
reptiles at the footstool of power." Voting for impeachment was along party lines,
with 11 articles of impeachment delivered to the Senate on February 24, 1868.
In the small towns across America, little news on the impeachment trial made the local
newspaper. The Sidney's republican newspaper, the Journal, did not miss the chance
to take a swipe at the President, however. When new editor D. M. Bliss took over the Sidney
Journal during the spring of 1868, he castigated the Democratic party that had
"...so blindly followed Andrew Johnson in his treasonable and corrupting
designs." Mr. Bliss ironically ended his first editorial by pledging to "make
the Journal a good moral and instructive family paper."