es lately in
rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even
that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two
men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly
understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late
autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the
President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a
certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."

From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr.
Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that
unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any
important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a
disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was
regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful
exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies,
which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to
forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of
ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the
controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous
bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.

[Illustration: TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER]

The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress,
which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House
of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the
President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which
substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel
States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress.
This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported
by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of
Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were
but few--in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut,
Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period,
Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House
of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the
New York _Times_, acted as the principal Republican champion of the
"President's policy."

[Illustration: PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON

WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS' WAR