mained as Secretary of War, though he was now a
bitter opponent of the President,--a safeguard over the army, as the
radical leaders considered him, and by his attitude and natural temper a
constant exasperation to his nominal chief. A fierce and bloody riot in
New Orleans, of which the precise causes were obscure, but in which the
negroes were the sufferers, heightened the Northern anxiety as to the
general situation.

The popular tide evidently ran with Congress, yet Johnson had the
promise of very respectable support until he threw it away. His
extempore expressions suggested an overweening view of his own position.
To the committee reporting to him the Philadelphia convention, he said,
"We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a
body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United
States--but in fact a Congress of only a part of the States." In
September he made a tour of the Northern States, taking in his train
Secretaries Seward and Welles, with Grant and Farragut;--"swinging round
the circle," he called his trip. He made addresses in the principal
cities, in which he denounced his opponents, sometimes with vulgar
abuse, bragged of his own rise from tailor to President, and bandied
words with the mob. He shamed many of the men of character--Beecher
among them--who had viewed him with favor. The tide turned
overwhelmingly against him. The November election returned a Congress
consisting in the House of 143 Republicans to 49 Democrats, with a
Senate of 42 Republicans to 11 Democrats.

It was like the hand of Nemesis that the South, led to crushing defeat
by its slave-holding aristocracy, should now have its interests
sacrificed through the characteristic faults of one of its poor
whites,--his virtues overborne by his narrow judgment, uncontrolled
temper and coarse speech.

Warned by the election, the South might well have accepted the
Fourteenth Amendment as the price of its restoration. But it failed to
read the handwriting on the wall. It could not yet brook acquiescence in
the exclusion of its old leaders, and the alternative of negro suffrage
or reduced power in Congress. The pride of race, the unquenched spirit
of the "lost cause," prompted it to stand out for better terms. During
the autumn and winter of 1866-7 the lately seceded States, except
Tennessee, rejected the amendment. So failed the first congressional
plan of reconstruction, as the President's earlier plan had