ss severity with which
he would visit treason with death. But the Southern politicians, finding
that further military resistance was hopeless, resorted at once to their
old game of intrigue and management, and proved that, fresh as they were
from the experience of violent methods, they had not forgotten their old
art of manipulating Presidents. They adapted themselves with marvellous
flexibility to the changed condition of things, in order to become
masters of the situation, and began to declaim in favor of the Union,
even while their curses against it were yet echoing in the air. They
wheedled the President into pardoning, in the place of hanging them;
they made themselves serviceable agents in carrying out his plan of
reconstruction; they gave up what it was impossible for them to retain,
in order to retain what it would destroy their influence to give up;
they got possession of him to the extent of insinuating subtly into his
mind ideas which they made him think he himself originated; and finally
they capped the climax of their skilful audacity, by taking him out of
"practical relations" with the party to which he was indebted for his
elevation, and made him the representative of the small party which
voted against him, and of the defeated Rebel Confederacy, which, of
course, could not do even that. The Southern politicians have succeeded
in many shrewd political contrivances in the course of our history, but
this last is certainly their masterpiece. Its only parallel or precedent
is to be found in Richard's wooing of Anne:--

"What! I, that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate;
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit withal,
But the plain devil, and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her,--all the world to nothing!"

Now can the people trust these politicians to the extent of placing in
their hands the powers of their State governments, and the
representative power of their States in Congress, without exacting
irreversible guaranties necessary for the public safety? Can the people
uphold, as against Congress, a President whose mind seems to be so much
under the influence of these men that he publicly insults the
legislature of the nation? Is the President to be supported because he
sustains State Rights against Cen