ture
of the possible interpretations by which the Constitution may be made
to mean this or that, and more of what will help the present need and
conduce to the future strength and greatness of the whole country. It
was by precisely such constitutional quibbles, educating men to believe
they had a right to claim whatever they could sophistically demonstrate
to their own satisfaction,--and self-interest is the most cunning of
sophists,--that we were interpreted, in spite of ourselves, into civil
war. It was by just such a misunderstanding of one part of the country
by another as that to which Mr. Johnson has lent the weight of his name
and the authority of his place, that rendered a hearty national
sympathy, and may render a lasting reorganization, impossible.

If history were still written as it was till within two centuries, and
the author put into the mouth of his speakers such words as his
conception of the character and the situation made probable and
fitting, we could conceive an historian writing a hundred years hence
to imagine some such speech as this for Mr. Johnson in an interview
with a Southern delegation.

"Gentlemen, I am glad to meet you once more as friends, I wish I might
say as fellow-citizens. How soon we may again stand in that relation to
each other depends wholly upon yourselves. You have been pleased to say
that my birth and lifelong associations gave you confidence that I
would be friendly to the South. In so saying, you do no more than
justice to my heart and my intentions; but you must allow me to tell
you frankly, that, if you use the word South in any other than a purely
geographical sense, the sooner you convince yourselves of its
impropriety as addressed to an American President, the better. The
South as a political entity was Slavery, and went out of existence with
it. And let me also, as naturally connected with this topic, entreat
you to disabuse your minds of the fatally mistaken theory that you have
been conquered by the North. It is the American people who are victors
in this conflict, and who intend to inflict no worse penalty on you
than that of admitting you to an entire equality with themselves. They
are resolved, by God's grace, to Americanize you, and America means
education, equality before the law, and every upward avenue of life
made as free to one man as another. You urge upon me, with great force
and variety of argument, the manifold evils of the present unsettled
state of