party with which they had so long
been identified. The idea of making the question of impeachment
a matter of party discipline was utterly indefensible and preposterous.
"Those senators," as Horace Greeley declared, "were sublimely in
the right who maintained their independent judgment--whether it
was correct or erroneous, in a matter of this kind, and who
indignantly refused all attempts to swerve them from their duty as
they had undertaken to perform it by solemn oaths." The Chief
Justice was also cruelly and inexcusably wronged by imputing corrupt
motives to his official action. His integrity and courage had been
amply demonstrated through many long years of thorough and severe
trial; and yet many of his Republican friends, both in the Senate
and House, who had known him throughout his political career,
denounced him as an apostate and a traitor, and even denied him
all social recognition. Senator Howe, of Wisconsin, was especially
abusive, and made himself perfectly ridiculous by the extravagance
and malignity of his assaults. The judicial spirit was everywhere
wanting, and the elevation of Senator Wade to the Presidency in
the midst of so much passion and tumult, and with the peculiar
political surroundings which the event foreshadowed, would have
been, to say the least, a very questionable experiment for the
country.

The excitement attending the trial of the President soon subsided,
but the Republicans continued anxious about the state of the country.
The work of reconstruction was only fairly begun, and its completion
was involved in the approaching presidential election. Chase and
Seward had lost their standing in the party, and there was no longer
any civilian in its ranks whose popularity was especially commanding
or at all over-shadowing. Under these circumstances it was quite
natural to turn to the army, and to canvass the claims of Gen.
Grant. The idea of his nomination was exceedingly distasteful to
me. I personally knew him to be intemperate. In politics he was
a Democrat. He did not profess to be a Republican, and the only
vote he had ever given was cast for James Buchanan in 1856, when
the Republican party made its first grand struggle to rescue the
Government from the clutches of slavery. Moreover, he had had no
training whatever in civil administration, and no one thought of
him as a statesman. But the plea of his availability as a military
chieftain was urged with great effect, and wa