tatives were out of Congress no power could get them in
without the consent of either house. Violent advisers of the President
argued that a Congress excluding the members of eleven States by
prearrangement was a "rump," and without authority, but they failed to
influence either the conduct of the majority or the acts of Johnson.

In the Thirty-ninth Congress, which sat in 1865 and 1866, it was the
problem of the leaders, Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus
Stevens in the House, to hold the party together and to block the
designs of the President. In the House, the heavy Republican majority
made this easy. In the Senate the majority was slighter, and could be
kept at two thirds only by unseating a Democratic Senator from New
Jersey, after which event both houses were able to defy Johnson and to
pass measures over his veto. The vetoes began when Johnson refused his
consent to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Bills. These and
all other important acts of reconstruction were forced upon the
President by the two-thirds vote.

The split, so far as founded upon honest divergence in legal theory, was
embarrassing. It was made disgraceful by the violence of the radical
Republicans and the intemperate retorts of Johnson. In 1866 Congress
sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the States for ratification. In 1867 it
passed its bills for actual reconstruction under the control of the army
of the United States, and defied Johnson to interfere by refusing to
allow him to remove officials from office.

Johnson carried himself through the partisan struggle with ability and
success. His language was often extreme, but he enforced the acts which
Congress passed as vigorously as if they had been his own. So far as any
theory of the Constitution met the facts of reconstruction, his has the
advantage, but in a situation not foreseen by the Constitution force
outranked logic, and the radical Republicans with two-thirds in each
house possessed the force. There was no lapse in the President's
diligence and no flaw in his official character which his enemies could
use. They began to talk of impeachment in 1866, but could find no basis
for it.

The Tenure-of-Office Act furnished the pretext for impeachment. Advised
by his Attorney-General that it was unconstitutional, Johnson dismissed
the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, for whose protection the law had
been passed. In removing Stanton he broke with Grant, commanding the
army,