South. But it did disqualify all the representative whites from holding office and did reduce representation in Congress in proportion as the negro vote was suppressed. The Amendment was rejected by the Southern States with the exception of Tennessee: the rejection being undoubtedly caused to some degree by the President's advice. The Reconstruction Acts that followed in 1867 substituted for the "Johnson Governments" military rule; and established universal negro suffrage in the South and in the District of Columbia. And this was at a time when in the rest of the country the vote-except in the six states where the negro population was negligible -was refused to the freedman. Ohio, in fact, rejected it by a large majority in the very year that Congress passed the Reconstruction Act. The South, subjected by army despotism to the rule of ignorant ex-slaves and thieving white carpetbaggers, was plunged into a bitterness and despair that left wounds. much harder to heal than any the war inflicted. The worst wrong of all was that dealt the negro himself. He was cheated of the normal progress that would have been his had he been regarded, not as a personified vote to keep the Republican machine in power, but a human being in need of tutelage and a potential factor in industrial reconstruction. He was alternately catered to or neglected, and at all times misunderstood. Had Lincoln's suggestion, that the suffrage might be experimentally extended to especially intelligent negroes, supplemented, perhaps, by Johnson's proposition to include also those with a small prop

erty qualification, and that of moderate Republicans to further include freedmen who had fought by the side of white Union soldiers during the war been followed, the suffrage might have proved a ladder for the race to climb by, instead of a snare to pull it down.

On the date of this last measure, March 2, 1867, was passed an act with the express purpose of having it violated! This was the Tenure of Office Act. It forbade the President of the United States to remove officers of the government without the consent of the Senate; and made the tenure of cabinet office coextensive with the administration. This was designed to keep in office Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, who, by reason of his affiliation with the Radical element had become, not only increasingly hostile to the President, but disloyal. As the breach between President and Congress widened, impeachment, threatened after the first disagreement, became a settled purpose with the Radicals.

The difficulty was to find a cause for impeachment. The President, in vetoing legislation, had committed no crime against existing law. He was merely exercising his constitutional rights. There would have to be some law passed which would conflict with the President's principles and whose infraction would constitute the "high crime and misdemeanor" which the Constitution laid down as the sole ground on which a president could be impeached.

The enormous powers given to the military governments established by the Reconstruction Act, executed by a Secretary of War in tune with the utmost Radical severity, would be

likely to yield a harvest of disagree ment between the Executive and his Secretary of War which would make violation of the Tenure of Office Act by the President more than a mere possibility. The Tenure of Office Act was passed solely to retain Stanton in office and thus either to force Johnson to execute Radical legislation or run the risk of his removal by impeachment. That Stanbery, the Attorney General, declared the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional; that Stanton, himself, had originally condemned it as such, had no effect on its passage or on its use by Stanton to hold himself in office. Yet it is now generally conceded that this law violated the intention of the Constitution that the Executive shall have in his Cabinet men who are in harmony with his policy. Its repeal, not long after Johnson's administration, has settled the question beyond doubt.

Our interest now must be centered on the Cabinet which Johnson, in his determination to continue the work of Lincoln, had retained practically intact. They were not only men of ability but, with the exception of Stanton, generally harmonious and loyal to the President at a time when loyalty meant to forfeit the favor of an all-powerful Republican congress. It is by the thousand details of cabinet meetings, narrated in Welles' diary, the informal discussion reported, and social contacts implied, that the varying characteristics of the cabinet members emerge. And it is by these daily comments that the figure of Andrew Johnson begins to be built up: the real Andrew Johnson to these men-reticent, calm and dignified. His quietude is insisted on;

his low voice, his gentleness, are in almost ludicrous contrast to the popular caricature that is, at the same time, being created in the partizan press a coarse ranter, brandishing arms and shrieking. Inference is inescapable. Among the group with which he had most to do, Johnson is the leader, and that, not only because of his official position but because of his own innate force and conviction. It is impossible not to compare the general tone of cabinet comment on Johnson with that drawn forth earlier by Lincoln: one recognizes, with amazement, that to these cabinet members the figure of Andrew Johnson is of as much dignity as that of his great predecessor. There is nothing to indicate that Johnson was taken any less seriously than was Abraham Lincoln whom the world now recognizes as one of its greatest and most beneficent figures.

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Of all the Cabinet, Welles appears as the most positive in his support of Johnson, although that may be merely because it is he who perpetuated passing emotions and opinions in diary. From the beginning he had a strong premonition that Stanton was to wreck the administration. This may, to some extent, have been caused by what the Secretary of the Navy felt to be the War Secretary's ungenerous depreciation of the work of the Navy during the war just ended! But an incident that had occurred in the beginning of Johnson's administration furnished more valid grounds, because more impersonal. In a cabinet disagreement over the President's "Loyal Tenth" Reconstruction policy, Har

lan and Speed had agreed with Johnson while Stanton had been in opposition. It has always been cabinet etiquette, when a situation of this kind arises, that the element in disagreement with the President's policy should resign. In this case, Stanton, who should have retired, retained his seat, while Harlan and Speed felt constrained, because of his continuance in the Cabinet, to retire.

The President, however, not willing to jump to a conclusion or to accept the opinion of anyone else, waited for proof of Stanton's disloyalty: he never seemed to feel animosity toward anyone for a mere difference of opinion. Welles, with others of the Cabinet, felt that he waited too long. Certainly the War Secretary thwarted in every way the President's effort to soften the rigors of the military administration of the South by making appointment of just and humane officers and recalling any officer who had in any way exceeded his powers. When Johnson was finally convinced that Stanton's loyalty was to the Radical Machine -and yet not until the reëstablishment of military control over the South made it possible for the Secretary of War to do actual harm-he waited only until the recess of Congress to remove Stanton and appoint General Grant. Johnson had reason to believe that Grant was in sympathy with his own clement attitude, while the General's popularity would prevent opposition to his serving in Stanton's stead.

The President's plan was to avoid any situation that would lead to Congressional interference; but to force the issue into the courts. With

Grant as recess Secretary of War and Congress not in session Stanton and his faction could have no immediate redress but to enter suit. And, as The Tenure of Office Act was generally considered unconstitutional, there was little reason to fear the result of covert procedure. A verdict favorable to the President's policy would improve his position before the country. If, on the other hand, the matter was not thrown into the courts and the President was freed from a freed from a political enemy in his cabinet, he would be able, even under the infamous Reconstruction Acts, to secure better administration of the military government in the South. When General Grant accepted a pro tem appointment during the recess of Congress there was reason to believe that he was wholly in sympathy with the administration policy.

But, as time went on and the coming presidential contest threw Grant's shadow before it, his support of the President weakened. In entry after entry of Welles' diary occurs "Grant is weakening," "He is being won over." Far from friendly at the beginning with the War Secretary, Grant later apparently acted in harmony with his plans. For, while during the recess of Congress the General fulfilled the duties of the position that Stanton, after protest, had vacated, as soon as Congress convened, his moves were shuffling and contradictory. The President, realizing that the predestined Republican candidate in the next presidential election might not be willing to risk the displeasure of the Radicals, had made a definite agreement with Grant. Grant. By the Monday Congress

convened Grant was to tell Johnson definitely whether he would allow his name to be presented as Secretary of War. Thus, in case he was not loyal to Johnson, another popular appointment might be made. Grant did not keep his promise. He waited until Congress, on Tuesday, refused to confirm the appointment. Then he retired and left Stanton in possession of the office. When Grant's explanation was requested at the next cabinet meeting he denied having made the promise, although the President made public a statement signed by five members of the Cabinet, now in the archives of the Government, affirming that the promise had been made.

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It is impossible to approach the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in the mood of solemnity which the tremendous words demand. Twenty regrettable months had preceded it in Congress: of jockeying for position, of declarations that there would be an impeachment: of counter declarations that there would not be. The Judiciary Committee had once reported that there were no tenable grounds for impeachment, only to reverse its decision not many months later and upon no new evidence. If the nation had a distinctly blasé attitude when the show at last came off we of this day may, perhaps, allow ourselves to regard it as a farceif as essentially melancholy as farces often are.

The most extraordinary incidents of clownish plotting wherein it is difficult to distinguish between conspirators and dupes, between accusers and criminals, preceded the impeachment and pervaded it. Ashley, the

introducer of the Motion to Impeach in the House had previously brought charges that Johnson was privy to the assassination of Lincoln, the grounds for the congressman's belief being the assertion of a criminal, whose alias was Conover, that he could produce evidence of the fact -Conover at that moment being in prison because he had manufactured evidence of Jefferson Davis's complicity in the murder of Lincoln in order to procure his own release from a previous jail sentence! Ashley, moreover, was shown to have believed that both Harrison and Taylor had been poisoned and that their respective Vice Presidents were, in each case, privy to the murder.

There is also record of some tangled web of sordid intrigue in which Ben Butler, the Manager of the Impeachment, is associated with Jeremiah Black, the brilliant lawyer who for a short time headed the President's defense, in a speculation growing out of Vela Alta. This was a guano island whose possession was disputed by citizens of this country with San Domingo near which is Vela Alta. Black, almost immediately on acceptance of the President's case, asked the Executive to confirm the citizens of this country in ownership of the island, the Secretary of State having previously refused to do so. When Johnson declined to override his Secretary of State, Black showed him, with calculated significance, the names of four of the Managers of the Impeachment as interested in Vela Alta, among them Ben Butler, whose reputation for honesty was almost as bad then as it is now. When the President still refused to act, Black resigned with

every sign of anger, thus giving the whole country the impression that he considered Andrew Johnson's case a weak one. This and other sub rosa attempts made by Butler to induce the President to bargain with the Radicals, repelled as quietly as in the Vela Alta incident, was a worthy prelude to the subsequent methods of the accusers in this serio-comic trial. All this was in key with the rising tide of materialism which is always the ignoble reaction from the heroic passions and heroic sufferings of war. The victorious party as a whole seemed mad to secure some tangible good; there was an unprecedented avalanche of office-seekers; the President had to be protected from the women lobbyists who had all at once become the fashion possibly because the report had gone around that Andrew Johnson had the masculine weakness of finding it difficult to refuse anything to a pretty face. It was amazing how many pretty women were found to have un-pretty Causes. Graft began to supersede heroism and warfare gave way to intrigue.

And nobody but Gilbert and Sullivan could have done complete justice to the concluding farce at the War Department. Stanton refused to allow General Thomas, an amiable and talkative old gentleman appointed Secretary of War, ad interim -and promptly nicknamed "Ad Interim Thomas"-to take possession. Stanton barricaded himself and a cot in the office of the Secretary of War. Even the strained nerves of President and Cabinet relaxed over the grotesque absurdity of the scenes that followed. A momentary gleam of humor makes one realize what

alleviation of the long strain Lincoln's ineradicable sense of fun would have been. In his diary Welles gives notice, with a kind of ponderous verbal prancing, that he is going to be funny: "Some laughter took place, after Cabinet Council, over the fortifications and entrenchments of the War Department and the trepidation of Stanton who has this morning doubled his guard. Kennedy, Chief of New York Police, sent a letter to Speaker Colfax, that some nitroglycerine had disappeared from New York, and that shrewd, sagacious and patriotic functionary knew not where it had gone, unless to Washington. The chivalrous and timid Speaker at once laid this tremendous missive before the House, and the consternation of that gallant band of Radicals became excessive. A large additional police force had been placed around the Capitol, but as it was still considered unsafe an immediate adjournment was called for. Stanton, unfortunate unfortunate man, could not adjourn. There was no refuge for him, save in the War Department which is surrounded and filled with soldiers to protect from poor old General Thomas."

It is worth while to perpetuate this passage. It is the only laugh in Welles's half a million words.