choose between the
North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one
side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they
had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no
drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of
Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of
this had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man,
understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of
Lincoln he proceeded not very skillfully to build upon it.

The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the
hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus
Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind
the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and
brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians equally
of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and
their plans. It was not alone Johnson's lack of temper and tact that
gave them the whip hand. His removal from office would have opened
the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson's
position was from the beginning beleaguered and came perilously near
before the close to being untenable.

Grant, a political nondescript, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist,
came after; and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the
triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of
1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country
face to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was
in irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt
that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not and should
not endure.

II

Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln
and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the
ebb tide of its disastrous fortunes.

It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans,
dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and
issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention
to assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction
and inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight fo