been to preserve the Union of the States. I never, for a single moment, entertained the opinion that a State could withdraw from the Union of its own will. That attempt was made. It has failed. I continue to pursue the same line of policy which has been my constant guide. I was against dissolution. Dissolution was attempted; it has failed; and now I can not take the position that a State which attempted to secede is out of the Union, when I contended all the time that it could not go out, and that it never has been out. I can not be forced into that position. Hence, when the States and their people shall have complied with the requirements of the Government, I shall be in favor of their resuming their former relations to this Government in all respects.

"I do not intend to say anything personal, but you know as well as I do that at the beginning, and indeed before the beginning, of the recent gigantic struggle between the different sections of the country, there were extreme men South and there were extreme men North. I might make use of a homely figure, which is sometimes as good as any other, even in the illustrations of great and important questions, and say that it has been hammer at one end of the line and anvil at the other; and this great Government, the best the world ever saw, was kept upon the anvil and hammered before the Rebellion, and it has been hammered since the Rebellion; and there seems to be a disposition to continue the hammering until the Government shall be destroyed. I have opposed that system always, and I oppose it now.

"The Government, in the assertion of its powers and in the maintenance of the principles of the Constitution, has taken hold of one extreme, and with the strong arm of physical power has put down the Rebellion. Now, as we swing around the circle of the Union, with a fixed and unalterable determination to stand by it, if we find the counterpart or the duplicate of the same spirit that played to this feeling and these persons in the South, this other extreme, which stands in the way must get out of it, and the Government must stand unshaken and unmoved on its basis. The Government must be preserved.

"I will only say, in conclusion, that I hope all the people of this country, in good faith and in the fullness of their hearts,

will, upon the principles which you have enunciated here to-day, of the maintenance of the Constitution and the preservation of the Union, lay aside every other feeling for the good of our common country, and, with uplifted faces to Heaven, swear that our gods and our altars and all shall sink in the dust together rather than that this glorious Union shall not be preserved.

"I am gratified to find the loyal sentiment of the country developing and manifesting itself in these expressions; and now that the attempt to destroy the Government has failed at one end of the line, I trust we shall go on determined to preserve the Union in its original purity against all opposers.

"I thank you, gentlemen, for the compliment you have paid me, and I respond most cordially to what has been said in your resolutions and address, and I trust in God that the time will soon come when we can meet under more favorable auspices than we do now."

CHAPTER XII.

STATE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT THE END OF 1865-FATE OF THE ASSASSINS — THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION-RECONSTRUCTION-THE PRESIDENT'S POLICY-MR. JOHNSON'S FIRST ANNUAL MESSAGE.

TH

HE court which had been organized for the trial of the persons implicated in the assassination of President Lincoln completed its work after the examination of several hundred witnesses; and Mr. Johnson approved the sentence by which four of them, one being a woman, were hanged on the 7th of July, 1865, and the others, three to imprisonment for life, and one for six years. The bodies of these creatures were buried at the arsenal grounds at Washington, and with them that of the actual murderer of President Lincoln.

Shortly after this horrid event, Henry Wirz, the keeper of Andersonville Prison, was tried on the charge of being a traitor and murdering prisoners contrary to the laws of war and civilization, and he was also sentenced and hanged early in November, 1865. Wirz's main defense was that he was the mere instrument of others, and was acting under orders which he could not disobey, and not a few there were who deemed his plea a good one.

But time had begun to soften public feeling, and

forgiveness and mercy slowly took the place of vengeance. The President began to be censured for his severity in some quarters, and especially was he severely criticised for hanging the woman. The usual amount of "gush," ever displayed when woman is involved, was found in the newspapers; and yet, when the President saw that he had done enough, and began to bestow pardons where nothing else ultimately could have been done, the cry rose, hot and strong, against him for treachery to his promises and pretensions. That was the way Andy Johnson was making treason odious! And so, in a few months, with a very considerable class, from an object of admiration the President became a thing of disgust and ridicule. With them this feeling increased until before the close of his Administration he was only mentioned with contempt. To this day many of these persons hold the impression that Andrew Johnson was a treacherous, foolish, and very wicked President, because he failed to carry out their wishes, under the mistaken notion that he was under obligations to do so.

Although there was long a very decided opinion that Jefferson Davis should have been hanged, this finally settled down, in the minds of the more vehement, into a modified form of the old moral axiom: "Poor old devil! if he had got his deserts at the hands of Andrew Johnson, he would have expiated and ended his crimes and follies on the scaffold!"

At the present time there is a general, but undemonstrative, conviction that President Johnson did

not abuse the pardoning power; and a candid review of his difficult Administration, in the light of the bad passions and political turbulence of the times, will fail, perhaps, to convince the mind that he did not do about the best and most he could or should have done in fulfilling his promise to make treason odious. Many thousands of the rebels were, perhaps, equally guilty, and a wholesale slaughter of these would have presented a spectacle which neither patriotism nor civilization could have justified. Both the memories of the past and the history of this country are better for things happening as they did, or no worse than they did.

By the time Congress assembled President Johnson had fallen into a very well-defined policy. Where the military commanders misinterpreted his purposes and crossed them, he went without hesitancy to the rescue. This was especially apparent in interference with his permission to the provisional governors to call upon the State militia instead of the regular soldiers for aid in issuing processes, and introducing the work of reorganization.

President Johnson had started out on the supposition or belief that the States engaged in the Rebellion had never been out of the Union. This had been the opinion of Mr. Lincoln, and this was always the opinion of most or all Union men of intelligence after the passage of the extravagant period at the outset. No State had power, either with or without the consent of all the other States, to separate itself from the Union. This was the theory of the friends