st endeavor was able to inflict. No
impartial reader can examine the record of the pleadings and arguments
of the Managers who appeared on behalf of the House, without feeling
that the President was impeached for one series of misdemeanors, and
tried for another series. This was perhaps not unnatural. The
Republicans had the gravest cause to complain of the President's course
on public affairs. He had professed the most radical creed of their
party, had sought their confidence, had received their suffrages.
Entrusted with the chief Executive power of the Nation by Republican
ballots, he professed upon his accession to office the most entire
devotion to the principles of the party; but he had, with a baseness
hardly to be exaggerated, repudiated his professions, deserted the
friends who had confided in him, and made an alliance with those who
had been the bitterest foes of the Union in the bloody struggle which
had just closed.

In the outraged and resentful minds of those who had sustained the
Union cause through its trials, the real offenses of the President
were clearly seen, and bitterly denounced:--his hostility to the
Fourteenth Amendment; his unwillingness to make citizenship National;
his opposition to all efforts to secure the safety of the public debt,
and the sacredness of the soldier's pension; his resistance to measures
that would put the rebel debt beyond the possibility of being a burden
upon the whole nation or even upon the people of the Southern States;
his determination that freedmen should not be placed within the
protection of Organic law; his eagerness to turn the Southern States
over to the control of the rebel element, without condition and without
restraint; his fixed hostility to every form of reconstruction that
looked to national safety and the prevention of another rebellion; his
opposition to every scheme that tended to equalize representation in
Congress, North and South, and his persistent demand that the negro
should be denied suffrage, yet be counted in the basis of
apportionment; his treacherous and malignant conduct in connection with
the atrocious massacre at New Orleans; his hostility to the growth of
free States in the North-West, while he was constantly urging the
instant re-admission of all the rebel States; his denial of a morsel
of food to the suffering and starving negro and white Unionist of
the South in their dire extremity, as shown by his veto of the
Freedmen's-bureau