for the impeachment of Johnson referred to the Judiciary Committee of the House in January, 1867; but although Ashley and Ben Butler eagerly pursued every clue and exploited every rumor that might lead to the indictment of the President for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," the report which the committee sent to the House was "a hotchpotch of calumnious and irrelevant trivialities," and the motion to impeach was defeated by a vote of 108 to 57. But the net was already spread for the President. The Tenure-of-Office Act of March 2, 1867 (p. 14, n. 2), had been passed chiefly for the sake of tempting Johnson to disobey it. Secretary of War Stanton was "virtually a spy in Johnson's cabinet." He was hand in glove with the radicals in Congress, who urged him to "stick" to his place. When Johnson asked him to resign in August, 1867, during the recess of Congress, Stanton refused in a curt and insolent note. Then Johnson suspended him and appointed General Grant Secretary of War ad interim. When Congress reassembled, the Senate refused to acquiesce in the suspension of Stanton, and Grant immediately relinquished the office to him;1 whereupon Johnson dismissed Stanton in spite of the Tenure-ofOffice Act, and named Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in his place. A series of scenes followed, worthy of the vaudeville stage-including defiant dialogues between Stanton and Thomas at the war office; the arrest of Thomas before breakfast the next morning, on a complaint sworn out by the irate Secretary of War; the soothing of the ruffled spirits of the rivals, after Thomas's release on bail, by a friendly chat and a drink of whisky; and the barricading of the war office against the attempt of Thomas to take possession of it by force. The upshot of the serio-comic affair was that Stanton held the fort, and the House immediately voted (128 to 47) to impeach the President.

1 For this Johnson was incensed at Grant, who, he claimed, had promised to hold on to the office or retire in favor of a person who would hold on to it, in order to bring the constitutionality of the Tenure-of-Office Act to the test of the court. Grant denied having made any such promise. But Johnson persisted in his charge of broken faith, and thereby completely alienated the general, who till then had been one of his supporters.

The trial before the Senate, acting as court and jury, under the presidency of Chief Justice Chase, was opened on March 4, and the final vote was taken on May 26, 1868. The charges, formulated in eleven articles, accused Johnson of ob-. structing the process of reconstruction, of declaring laws of Congress unconstitutional, of bringing the lawmakers into contempt by his unbecoming speeches, and of violating the Tenureof-Office Act. Only the last charge formed any plausible basis for impeachment; and on this point Johnson's able counsel1 showed, first, that the President's motive in dismissing Stanton had been to bring the constitutionality of the law before the courts, and, secondly, that it was extremely doubtful whether the Tenure-of-Office Act applied to the relations between Johnson and Stanton at all. For the act protected cabinet officers from removal "during the term of the President by whom they had been appointed," and Stanton had been appointed by Lincoln. But arguments of legality or equity had little weight with the House managers of the prosecution, of whom the implacable Butler, Stevens, Bingham, Boutwell, and Logan were the chiefs. They made the trial "a party caucus for the removal of Andrew Johnson." Their concern was not so much to prove his guilt as to browbeat the doubtful senators into voting for his conviction. Their procedure was political, not judicial. Like the Jacobins of the French Revolution, they urged the tribunal to punish the self-convicted traitor rather than to try the privileged defendant. "Tyrant," "incubus," "criminal," "apostate," "usurper," were some of the epithets that adorned the worst diatribes of Butler and Logan. Johnson was to be "hurled from the White House and consigned once more to the fond embraces of his rebel confederates in the South and their faithful allies in the North." In spite of threats and entreaties, however, the radicals could not muster the two-thirds vote (36) necessary for conviction. On the vote on the eleventh article

1 They were Benjamin R. Curtis, ex-Justice of the Supreme Court; William M. Evarts, the leader of the New York bar; Attorney-General Stanbery; Judge Groesbeck of Illinois; and T. R. R. Nelson of Alabama-all, but the last named, men of the highest legal qualifications.

(May 16) seven Republican senators joined the twelve Democrats in the response "not guilty." Butler's "smelling committee" made desperate efforts to fix charges of fraud and bribery on the "seven traitors" and to coerce them into a change of heart; but the vote on the second and third articles (May 26) remained unchanged, at 35 to 19, and the President was acquitted by a single vote. The Senate then adjourned as a court sine die, and the radicals retired from the field in defeat. Stanton immediately resigned the war portfolio. His successor, General John M. Schofield, was confirmed by the Senate a few days later. Thus, for a second time (as in the acquittal of Justice Chase in 1805) the country was saved from the opprobrium of prostituting the ultimate constitutional safeguard of impeachment to the ends of political vengeance.

In the interval between the first and second votes on the articles of impeachment, the National Union Republican convention had met in Chicago (May 20) and unanimously nominated General Grant for the presidency, with Schuyler Colfax, the genial Speaker of the House, as his running mate. The platform indorsed the radical program of reconstruction, denounced the repudiation of the national debt in any form, and declared that while the regulation of the suffrage in the states of the secession belonged to Congress, in the loyal states it should be left to the people. The Democratic convention, which met in Tammany Hall, New York, on July 4, was confronted with a serious issue. The most promising candidates for the nomination, General George H. Pendleton of Ohio and Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, were "soft money" men. The platform adopted contained the "Ohio idea" advocated by Pendleton;

1 These seven, who deserve to have their names recorded on the tablets of fame, were Fessenden of Maine, Fowler of Tennessee, Grimes of Iowa, Henderson of Missouri, Ross of Kansas, Trumbull of Illinois, and Van Winkle of West Virginia. In 1901 Henderson told Professor Dunning that at least two other Republican senators (Sprague of Rhode Island and Willey of West Virginia) were ready to vote "not guilty" if their votes had been needed to acquit the President.

2 President Johnson had some supporters in the convention, and Chief Justice Chase was as anxious for the Democratic nomination in 1868 as Senator Chase and Secretary Chase had been for the Republican nomination in 1860 and 1864.

namely, that the government bonds (unless it was distinctly stated in the law of issue that they were payable in coin) should be redeemed in "lawful money"-that is, greenbacks. It also favored the taxation of national bonds, and condemned the Reconstruction Acts as "unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void." But the delegates could not be held either for the platform or for the proposed candidates. After a good deal of electioneering, in which the noted Copperhead, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, took a prominent part, the convention was stampeded to its presiding officer, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York. Francis P. Blair of Missouri was named for vice president.

According to the electoral vote Grant won a decisive victory over Seymour (214 to 80). He carried every state of the North and West except New York, New Jersey, and Oregon, and every reconstructed state of the South except Georgia and Louisiana. But his popular majority was only 300,000 in a vote of 5,700,000, in spite of the odium still attaching to the Democratic party for its "sympathy with the rebellion," the activity of Vallandigham and the Confederate brigadier generals in the convention, and the charges of "copperheadism" against Seymour for his resistance to the draft in New York in 1863. But for the 650,000 negro votes cast for Grant in the reconstructed states, Seymour would have had a majority at the polls in November. Even the personal popularity of General Grant could not win the majority of the white voters of the country to indorse the reconstruction program of 1867.

1 Although the question of the constitutionality of the greenbacks as "legal tender" had been presented to the Supreme Court as early as 1863 (Roosevelt vs. Meyer), it was not until 1870 that the court rendered a decision on the matter. Then, in the famous case of Hepburn vs. Griswold (February 7, 1870), by a vote of 4 to 3, it ruled that greenbacks were not legal tender in payment of debts contracted before the passage of the act authorizing their issue (1862). The next year, however, two new justices having been added to the bench, the court, in the case of Knox vs. Lee (May 1, 1871), reversed its decision by a vote of 5 to 4. Although this action brought considerable criticism upon the court, it had little effect on the business of the country, the legality of the greenbacks having been generally accepted.

Taught by the election of 1868 how necessary the negro vote was for the perpetuation of their power, the radical Republicans proceeded, early in 1869, to the passage of a Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, forbidding the United States or any state to deny the right of voting to any citizen on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." This amendment, added to the Constitution in the spring of 1870, marked the logical conclusion and the culmination of the congressional reconstruction policy. The Enforcement Acts, the Federal Election Acts, and the Ku-Klux Acts passed later were chiefly for the purpose of maintaining the Fifteenth Amendment. The amendment satisfied the theorists who from the first had contended for negro suffrage as a matter of "principle," the avengers who thought no punishment too severe for the sin of secession, and the politicians who wished to secure the negro vote to assure the dominance of the Republican party. Six days after the passage of the amendment President Johnson's troubled administration came to an end, and the hero of Donelson and Appomattox moved into the White House.

PROSPERITY AND PROTEST

Reconstruction, in the narrower, technical use of the word, means the restoration of the states of the secession to their place in the Union; but in a broader sense it covers a great number of readjustments, in both public and private life, to new conditions created largely by the Civil War. The war settled three questions which had divided counsels and roused apprehensions ever since the foundation of the republic. It forever abolished slavery, it firmly cemented the Union, and it finally established the supremacy of the national government over the states. At the same time, the war opened new questions of hardly less serious import than those which it settled.

1 Senator Morton, foreseeing that the Southern states would adopt measures to prevent the negroes from voting on other grounds, wanted the amendment enlarged to include property and educational clauses also; but such clauses would, of course, have hampered the states of the North in the regulation of their suffrage.