mpossible that the Rebel leaders could
gain, by the substitution, in the Executive chair, of this harsh,
determined, despotic nature, for the mild, kindly, merciful,
even-tempered, Abraham Lincoln. With Andrew Johnson for President, the
People felt that justice would fall upon the heads of the guilty, and
that the Country was safe. And so it happened that, while the mere
instruments of the assassination conspiracy were hurried to an
ignominious death, in the lull that followed, Jefferson Davis and others
of the Rebel chiefs, who had been captured and imprisoned, were allowed
to go "Scott-free, without even the semblance of a trial for their
Treason!"

It is not the purpose of this work to deal with the history of the
Reconstruction or rehabilitation of the Rebel States; to look too
closely into the devious ways and subtle methods through and by which
the Rebel leaders succeeded in flattering the vanity, and worming
themselves into the confidence and control, of Andrew Johnson--by
pretending to believe that his occupation of the Presidential Office had
now, at last, brought him to their "aristocratic" altitude, and to a
hearty recognition by them of his "social equality;" or to follow,
either in or out of Congress, the great political conflict, between
their unsuspecting Presidential dupe and the Congress, which led to the
impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, for high crimes and
misdemeanors in office, his narrow escape from conviction and
deposition, and to much consequent excitement and turmoil among the
People, which, but for wise counsels and prudent forethought of the
Republican leaders, in both Civil and Military life, might have
eventuated in the outbreak of serious civil commotions. Suffice it to
say, that in due time; long after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United
States Constitution had been ratified by three-fourths of all the
States; after Johnson had vexed the White House, with his noisy
presence, for the nearly four years succeeding the death of the great
and good Lincoln; and after the People, with almost unexampled
unanimity, had called their great Military hero, Grant, to the helm of
State; the difficult and perplexing problems involved in the
Reconstruction of the Union were, at last, successfully solved by the
Republican Party, and every State that had been in armed Rebellion
against that Union, was not only back again, with a Loyal State
Constitution, but was represented in both branc