surrender his hostility to its existence in any form whatever. In his
first annual message (nine months after the legislation just narrated)
he earnestly recommended its total repeal. "It could not," said the
President, "have been the intention of the framers of the Constitution,
when providing that appointments made by the President should receive
the consent of the Senate, that the latter should have the power to
retain in office persons placed there by Federal appointment against
the will of the President. _The law is inconsistent with a faithful
and efficient administration of the Government. What faith can an
Executive put in officials forced upon him, and those, too, whom he
has suspended for reason?_ How will such officials be likely to serve
an Administration which they know does not trust them?"

The President was evidently of the opinion that the doubtful and
contradictory construction of the Act as amended left the whole matter
(as described by Mr. Niblack of Indiana when the Committee report was
under consideration) "in a muddle;" with the inevitable result that
certain parties would be deceived and misled by the peculiarly tortuous
language which the Senate insisted upon introducing in the amendment.
The House had acted throughout in a straightforward manner, but the
most lenient critic would be compelled to say that the course of the
Senate was indirect and evasive. That body had evidently sought to
gratify the wishes of President Grant, on the one hand, and to preserve
some semblance of its power over appointments, on the other. It was
freely predicted at the time that so long as the Senate and the
President were in political harmony nothing would be heard of the
Tenure-of-office Act, but that when the political interests of the
Executive should come in conflict with those of the Senate there would
be a renewal of the trouble which had characterized the relations of
President Johnson and the Senate, and which led to the original
Tenure-of-office Act with its positive assertion of senatorial power
over the whole question of appointment and removal.

William Pitt Fessenden took part in the first session of Congress under
the Presidency of General Grant. It was his last public service. On
the eighth day of the following September (1869) he died at his
residence in Portland, Maine, in the sixty-third year of his age.
He was one of the many victims of that strange malady which, breaking
out with viru