uld
stubbornly reject all the nominations and the session of Congress end
without a confirmation, then, in that remote and highly improbably
event, the suspended officer, according to the proposed law, should be
restored to his place. The substance of the original Act was gone,
but the Senate sought shelter from its record of inconsistency under
the small shadow of this distant and hypothetical restoration of the
suspended officer.

But the House would not consent that even the small shadow should
remain. Representatives well knew that it was not agreeable to
President Grant that any authority should be retained by the Senate
whereby an obnoxious officer could in any event be kept in place
against his wishes, and they were in hearty accord with him. The
House had always been jealous of the power of the Senate over
appointments to office, and but for the desire to punish President
Johnson the representatives would never have consented to the
Tenure-of-office Act. They were now determined, if possible, to strip
the Senate of its great aggrandizement of power. The feeling of many
members of the House was to sustain an amendment offered by General
Logan directing that "all civil offices, except those of judges of
the United-States courts, filled by appointment before the 4th of
March, 1869, shall become vacant on the 30th of June, 1869." This
would have been a wholesale removal beyond any scheme attempted since
the organization of the Government; but it was not deemed wise even
to bring it to a test, and the House contented itself with the
rejection of the Senate amendments by a decisive vote.

The subject was then referred to a Conference Committee, consisting
of Messrs. Trumbull, Edmunds, and Grimes of the Senate, and Messrs.
Benjamin F. Butler, C. C. Washburn, and John A. Bingham of the House.
The Bill reported by this committee to both Houses is the present law
on the subject.(2) Mr. Trumbull, in making the report, gave this
assurance to the Senate: "As the Committee of Conference report the
bill, the suspended officer would go back at the end of the session
unless somebody else was confirmed in the place." On the same day in
the House, in answer to a pressing question from Mr. Hoar of
Massachusetts, Mr. Bingham expressed the opinion that "no authority
without the consent of the President can get a suspended officer back
into the same office again." General Butler, another of the House
conferees, said: "I am