he
Government, Johnson should stand firmly by the Union.

Of the twenty-two senators from the eleven States that afterwards
composed the Confederacy, Johnson was the only one who honorably
maintained his oath to support the Constitution; the only one who did
not lend his aid and comfort to the enemies of the Union. He remained
in his seat in the Senate, loyal to the Government, and resigned a year
after the outbreak of the war (in March, 1862), upon Mr. Lincoln's
urgent request that he should accept the important post of Military
Governor of Tennessee. His administration of that office and his firm
discharge of every duty under circumstances of great exigency and
oftentimes of great peril, gave to him an exceptional popularity in all
the Loyal States, and led to his selection for the Vice-Presidency in
1864. The national calamity had now suddenly brought him to a larger
field of duty, and devolved upon him the weightiest responsibility.

The assassination of Mr. Lincoln naturally produced a wide-spread
depression and dread of evil. His position had been one of exceptional
strength with the people. By his four years of considerate and
successful administration, by his patient and positive trust in the
ultimate triumph of the Union--realized at last as he stood on the edge
of the grave--he had acquired so complete an ascendancy over the public
mind in the Loyal States that any policy matured and announced by him
would have been accepted by a vast majority of his countrymen. But the
same degree of faith could not attach to Mr. Johnson; although after
the first shock of the assassination had subsided, there was a generous
revival of trust, or at least of hope, that the great work which had
been so faithfully prosecuted for four years would be faithfully
carried forward in the same lofty spirit to the same noble ends. The
people of the North waited with favorable disposition and yet with
balancing judgment and in exacting mood. They had enjoyed abundant
opportunity to acquaint themselves with the principles and the opinions
of the new President, and confidence in his future policy was not
unaccompanied by a sense of uncertainty and indeed by an almost painful
suspense as to his mode of solving the great problems before him. As
has already been indicated, the more radical Republicans of the North
feared that his birth and rearing as a Southern man and his long
identification with the supporters of the slave system m