rs who had
indicated a purpose to sustain the President, was evidently somewhat
stunned by Mr. Sumner's speech. He treated the outrages of which Mr.
Sumner complained as exceptional instances of bad conduct on the part
of the Southern people. "One man out of ten thousand," said Mr. Cowan,
"is brutal to a negro, and that is paraded here as a type of the whole
people of the South; whereas nothing is said of the other nine thousand
nine hundred and ninety-nine men who treat the negro well." Mr.
Cowan's argument was altogether inapposite; for what Mr. Sumner and Mr.
Wilson had complained of was not the action of individual men in the
South, but of laws solemnly enacted by Legislatures whose right to act
had been recognized by the Executive Department of the National
Government, and which had indeed been organized in pursuance of the
President's Reconstruction policy,--almost in fact by the personal
patronage of the President. The situation was one very difficult to
justify by a man with the record of Mr. Cowan. He had been not merely
a Republican before his entrance into the Senate but a radical
Republican, taking ground in the campaign of 1860 only less advanced
than that maintained by Mr. Thaddeus Stevens himself.

These debates in both Senate and House, at so early a period of the
session, give a full and fair indication of the temper which prevailed
in the country and in Congress. The majority of the members had not,
at the opening of the session, given up hope of some form of co-operation
with the President. As partisans and party leaders they looked
forward with something of dismay to the rending of all relations
with the Executive, and to the surrender of the political advantage
which comes to the party and to the partisan from a close alliance
between the Executive and Legislative Departments. On the re-assembling
of Congress after the holidays a great change was seen and realized
by all. It was feared by many, even of the most conservative,
that the policy of Congress and the policy of the President might come
into irreconcilable conflict, and that the party which had successfully
conducted the Government through the embarrassments, the trials and
the perils of a long civil war, might now be wrecked by an angry
controversy between two departments of the Government, each owing its
existence to the same great constituency,--the loyal people of the North.

Circumstances suggested the impossibility of a succe