The impeachment of Donald Trump isn’t that much different than the nation’s first impeachment, that of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Johnson was acquitted by the U.S. Senate, in part thanks to George Vickers, a senator from Kent County.

Vickers was not elected to the U.S. Senate by the people of Maryland. That’s because prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures.

So, Kent’s consummate lawyer was elected to the U.S. Senate by the Maryland legislature, by a vote of 59 to the nearest candidate’s 41, on March 4, 1868.

That nearest candidate was another lawyer, Philip F. Thomas, who, in theory, had already been elected to the post.

Hailing from Easton, Thomas, 57, was eminently qualified. A lifelong Talbot County resident, he started in politics in 1838. He served as the state’s governor from 1848 to 1851. He also served in the state legislature off and on, and for a while was in the administration of President James Buchanan.

But the Civil War changed the political landscape of the state and the nation.

Thomas was elected by the legislature in March 1867 as U.S. senator. But when Congress met in session in January 1868, the Republican majority refused to seat him and the following month, he was rejected. They claimed he wasn’t a viable candidate for the job because his son, John, had joined the Confederacy and fought in the war against Union forces. Worse, Thomas had sent his son money and aided him by other means during the war.

The Baltimore Sun opined in its Feb. 21, 1868, edition that aid to Vickers's son really had nothing to do with the Confederacy, but that his son’s participation in the losing side of the War Between the States was an excuse for the Republican majority to eliminate a Democrat with such a lofty political pedigree.

 “Never were a series of objections shown to be more completely frivolous and groundless than those assigned against Mr. Thomas. The act of the majority leaves nothing in doubt as to its motive.”

Vickers — well qualified for the job — didn’t really want it. In fact, he had for much of his life avoided the limelight, but was cast in it whether he liked it or not. But to the “Radical Republicans,” a more extreme faction of the Republican party, he was lesser known and perhaps seemed less a threat to the legislative status quo, even though he, too, had a son who had fought for the Confederacy.

Born in Kent County in 1801, the son of Capt. James and Lydia Towers Vickers, George Vickers graduated from Washington College in 1817 and began his own law practice in Chestertown in 1827, operating initially out of an office on Cross Street. Later he moved to Lawyer’s Row. His cases were numerous and consequential, and he soon made a name for himself in the county and the state as a thoughtful and articulate community leader. He bought a newspaper in 1838 — the Kent Bugle, which later became the Kent News — a vehicle for editorials supporting the Whig Party.

He was involved in real estate, and established his home with his wife, the former Mary Mansfield, in a substantial three-story manse on Mill Street. He was director of the Farmers & Mechanics Bank.

As a Whig, he became actively involved in politics. His local Whig leadership gave him some gravitas and in 1840, he was chosen an elector for William Henry Harrison. Harrison was elected president, but died a month after his inauguration. Locally, Vickers served on the county commission, the Chestertown town commission, and for a brief spell was a judge of the circuit court.

As the Civil War neared, he made it clear he supported preservation of the Union, and as a member of the Friends of the Constitution, opposed secession. After Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter at Charleston, S.C., in April 1861, igniting the war, Vickers was somber in a letter to the Kent News, April 27, 1861:

“The condition of public affairs and the impenetrable cloud that skirts the future, hang as a pall upon the spirits of the people, and should admonish us all of the necessity of unity of feeling and effort in these times of ominous peril, and lead us to look to a source higher than all earthly power for relief, in this the darkest hour of our country’s history.”

A slaveowner, he continued to support the dubious institution.

Soon after hostilities began, Gov. Thomas Holliday Hicks appointed Vickers as Major General of the Second Maryland Militia, a largely nominal political office, but with military trappings. As local men in Kent began preparing for war in the months following its onset, “Camp Vickers” was established north of Chestertown.

As much as he demurred, he continued to be drawn into local, state, and national politics. When Maryland’s new state constitution was under consideration, Vickers joined most of the voters in Kent in opposition, primarily because it freed the slaves in the state.

It also disenfranchised supporters of the Confederacy, another bone of contention, since many locals had fought or continued to fight for the Confederacy at the time of the vote.

The new constitution was approved by a scant margin statewide, but in Kent, 1,196 of the 1,434 votes cast on Oct. 13, 1864 opposed it. Nonetheless, freedom for Maryland slaves became the law of the state on Nov. 1, 1864, more than a year after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had been issued.

Perhaps that’s what drove him to run for the state senate in November 1865 against another Kent stalwart, Col. Edward Wilkins, who was associated with the “Radical Republicans.” Vickers won, with 562 votes against Wilkins’ 454.

In his second year as a state senator, 1867, he opposed the repeal of a law that required one of the U.S. senators elected by the state senate to be from the Eastern Shore.

The debate was part of the effort to reduce the power of the minority Democrats. The Republicans won, and the law was set aside. A vote afterward, to elect a U.S. senator, favored Gov. Thomas Swann, a Republican-turned-Democrat, but one who had opposed slavery and supported the 1864 constitution. At the time, Vickers was also in the running, but Swann’s own party convinced the governor to remain in that post, and Philip F. Thomas was chosen as the senator.

As noted, Thomas’ failure to be seated resulted in that singular March 4, 1868, election in the legislative session. Vickers was elevated to the federal post. It was a propitious election, and his role in taking on the weighty political office would have national consequences that echo most loudly in today’s divisive political environment.