do Wood of New York, and
the question becoming a party issue Mr. Ashley's resolution was
carried without a division after an ineffectual attempt to lay it on
the table,--a motion which was sustained by only thirty-two votes.
The committee proceeded in their work during the recess of Congress,
and reported the testimony on the 25th of the ensuing November (1867).

Some ninety-five witnesses had been examined, and the report of
testimony covered twelve hundred octavo pages. Much of the evidence
seemed irrelevant, and that which bore directly upon the question of
the President's offense fell far below the serious character assigned
to it by previous rumors. This was especially true in regard to the
testimony given by General Grant. There were secret and ominous
intimations that General Grant had been approached by the President
with the view of ascertaining whether, if it should be determined to
constitute a Congress of Democratic members from the North and rebel
members from the South (leaving the Republicans to come in or stay out
as they might choose), the Army could be relied upon to sustain such
a movement. There is no doubt that many earnest Republicans were so
impressed by the perverse course of President Johnson that they came
to believe him capable of any atrocious act. They gave credulous ear,
therefore, to these extravagant rumors; and in the end they succeeded
in making a deep impression upon the minds of certain members of the
Committee charged with the investigation into the President's official
conduct.

The persons who were giving currency to these rumors never seemed to
realize that General Grant, with his loyalty, his patriotism, and his
high sense of personal and official honor, could not for a moment have
even so much as listened to a proposition which involved an attack
upon the legitimacy of the Congress of the United States, and
practically contemplated its overthrow through means not different from
those by which Cromwell closed the sessions of the Long Parliament.
Nothing can be more certain than the fact that if President Johnson had
ever made such an intimation to General Grant, it would have been at
once exposed and denounced with a soldier's directness; and the
President would have been promptly impeached for an offense in which
his guilt would not have been doubtful.

It was not surprising, therefore, that by General Grant's testimony,(1)
the entire charge was dissipated into thin air,