RESIDENT BY HON. REVERDY JOHNSON, AUGUST, 18, 1866.

Mr. PRESIDENT: We are before you as a committee of the National Union
Convention, which met in Philadelphia on Tuesday, the 14th instant,
charged with the duty of presenting you with an authentic copy of its
proceedings.

Before placing it in your hands you will permit us to congratulate
you that in the object for which the convention was called, in the
enthusiasm with which in every State and Territory the call was
responded to, in the unbroken harmony of its deliberations, in the
unanimity with which the principles it has declared were adopted, and
more especially in the patriotic and constitutional character of the
principles themselves, we are confident that you and the country will
find gratifying and cheering evidence that there exists among the people
a public sentiment which renders an early and complete restoration of
the Union as established by the Constitution certain and inevitable.
Party faction, seeking the continuance of its misrule, may momentarily
delay it, but the principles of political liberty for which our
fathers successfully contended, and to secure which they adopted the
Constitution, are so glaringly inconsistent with the condition in
which the country has been placed by such misrule that it will not
be permitted a much longer duration.

We wish, Mr. President, you could have witnessed the spirit of concord
and brotherly affection which animated every member of the convention.
Great as your confidence has ever been in the intelligence and
patriotism of your fellow-citizens, in their deep devotion to the Union
and their present determination to reinstate and maintain it, that
confidence would have become a positive conviction could you have seen
and heard all that was done and said upon the occasion. Every heart
was evidently full of joy; every eye beamed with patriotic animation;
despondency gave place to the assurance that, our late dreadful civil
strife ended, the blissful reign of peace, under the protection, not of
arms, but of the Constitution and laws, would have sway, and be in every
part of our land cheerfully acknowledged and in perfect good faith
obeyed. You would not have doubted that the recurrence of dangerous
domestic insurrections in the future is not to be apprehended.

If you could have seen the men of Massachusetts and South Carolina
coming into the convention on the first day of its meeting hand in hand,
amid the rapturo