Bill; his cruel attempt to exclude the colored man
from the power to protect himself by law, in his shameless veto of the
Civil Rights Bill; and last, and worst of all, his heartless abandonment
of that Union-loving class of white men in the South who became the
victims of rebel hatred, from which he had himself escaped only by the
strength of the National arms. In recounting all the acts which made
up the roll of his political dishonor, Johnson had, in Republican
opinion, committed none so hideous as his turning over the Southern
Unionists to the vengeance of those who, as he well knew, were
incapable of dealing with them in a spirit of justice, and who were
unwilling to show mercy, even after they had themselves received it in
quality that was not strained.

Could the President have been legally and constitutionally impeached
for these offenses he should not have been allowed to hold his office
for an hour beyond the time required for a fair trial. But the
Articles of Impeachment did not even refer to any charge of this kind,
and a stranger to our history, in perusing them, could not possibly
infer that behind the legal verbiage of the Articles there was in the
minds of the representatives who presented them a deadly hostility to
the President for offenses totally different from the technical
violation of a statue, for which he was arraigned,--a statute that
never ought to have been enacted, as was practically confessed by its
framers, when, within less than a year after the Impeachment trial had
closed, they modified its provisions by taking away their most
offensive features.

The charges on which the House actually arraigned the President were
in substance, that he had violated the Tenure-of-office Act; that he
had conspired with Lorenzo Thomas to violate it; that he had consulted
with General Emory to see whether, independent of the General-in-Chief,
he could not issue orders to the army to aid him in his determination
to violate it; and lastly, that he had spoken of Congress in such a
manner as tended to bring a co-ordinate branch of the Government into
"disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach." The charge of
conspiring with Lorenzo Thomas, as well as that in respect to General
Emory, appeared in the end to be not only unsustained, but trivial.
The President had conspired in precisely the same way with General
Sherman when he urged him to accept the post of Secretary of War as Mr.
Stanton's succes