"

"You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker's
desk, and Sherman's men are going to force its passage to-night."

The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle
of his outraged dignity, and in thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and
the House adjourned.

As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping
the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:

"How did you do it?"

Stoneman's huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:

"I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if
they would join with me and defeat this bill, I'd give them a better one
the next session. And I will--negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it
whole!"

Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.

The Great Commoner laughed as he departed:

"He is yet too good for this world, but he'll forget it before we're done
this fight."

On the steps a beggar asked him for a night's lodging, and he tossed him a
gold eagle.

* * * * *

The North, which had rejected negro suffrage for itself with scorn,
answered Stoneman's fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and
sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.

So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the
very existence of Stanton's prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten,
and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and
forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew Johnson was from
Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a
Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under
Stoneman's assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and
every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance
with Lincoln's plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting favour
of traitors and rebels.

Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him,
and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation
could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of
the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant
to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties
were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial,
impeachment, and removal