t in our constitutional history,
involving, as it did, the accusation of the President of the United
States, required the Chief-Justice to preside at the trial before the
Senate, creating thus the tribunal to which the Constitution had
assigned this high jurisdiction. Beyond the injunction that the Senate,
when sitting for the trial of impeachments, should be "on oath,"
the Constitution gave no instruction to fix or ascertain the
character of the procedure, the nature of the duty assigned to the
specially-organized court, or the distribution of authority between the
Chief-Justice and the Senate. The situation lacked no feature of
gravity--no circumstance of solicitude--and the attention of the whole
country, and of foreign nations, watched the transaction at every stage
of its progress. No circumstances could present a greater disparity of
political or popular forces between accuser and accused, and none could
be imagined of more thorough commitment of the body of the court--the
Senate--both in the interests of its members, in their political
feeling, and their pre-judgments; all tending to make the condemnation
of the President, upon all superficial calculations, inevitable. The
effort of the Constitution to guard against mere partisan judgment, by
requiring a two-third vote to convict, was paralyzed by the complexion
of the Senate, showing more than four-fifths of that body of the party
which had instituted the impeachment and was demanding conviction. To
this party, as well, the Chief-Justice belonged, as a founder, a leader,
a recipient of its honors, and a lover of its prosperity and its fame.
The President, raised to the office from that of Vice-President--to
which alone he had been elected--by the deplored event of Mr. Lincoln's
assassination, was absolutely without a party, in the Senate or in the
country; for the party whose suffrages he had received for the
vice-presidency was the hostile force in his impeachment. And, to bring
the matter to the worst, the succession to all the executive power and
patronage of the Government, in case of conviction, was to fall into the
administration of the President of the Senate--the creature, thus, of
the very court invested with the duty of trial and the power of
conviction.

Against all these immense influences, confirmed and inflamed by a storm
of party violence, beating against the Senate-house without abatement
through the trial, the President was acquitted. To what wi