estimony of
witnesses rigidly cross-examined and deposing in the face of day.
If such a proceeding had been adopted toward me, unjust as I should
certainly have regarded it, I should, I trust, have met with a becoming
constancy a trial as painful as it would have been undeserved. I would
have manifested by a profound submission to the laws of my country my
perfect faith in her justice, and, relying on the purity of my motives
and the rectitude of my conduct, should have looked forward with
confidence to a triumphant refutation in the presence of that country
and by the solemn judgment of such a tribunal not only of whatever
charges might have been formally preferred against me, but of all the
calumnies of which I have hitherto been the unresisting victim. As
it is, I have been accused without evidence and condemned without a
hearing. As far as such proceedings can accomplish it, I am deprived of
public confidence in the administration of the Government and denied
even the boast of a good name--a name transmitted to me from a patriot
father, prized as my proudest inheritance, and carefully preserved for
those who are to come after me as the most precious of all earthly
possessions. I am not only subjected to imputations affecting my
character as an individual, but am charged with offenses against the
country so grave and so heinous as to deserve public disgrace and
disfranchisement. I am charged with violating pledges which I never
gave, and, because I execute what I believe to be the law, with usurping
powers not conferred by law, and, above all, with using the powers
conferred upon the President by the Constitution from corrupt motives
and for unwarrantable ends. And these charges are made without any
particle of evidence to sustain them, and, as I solemnly affirm,
without any foundation in truth.

Why is a proceeding of this sort adopted at this time? Is the occasion
for it found in the fact that having been elected to the second office
under the Constitution by the free and voluntary suffrages of the
people, I have succeeded to the first according to the express
provisions of the fundamental law of the same people? It is true that
the succession of the Vice-President to the Chief Magistracy has never
occurred before and that all prudent and patriotic minds have looked
on this new trial of the wisdom and stability of our institutions with
a somewhat anxious concern. I have been made to feel too sensibly
the difficult