bad men demagogues; but it was an honest effort on the part of the great majority of the delegates (whether wise or not) to reorganize the State on a loyal basis, and in accordance with the Congressional plan of reconstruction; and this was sufficient to arouse Mr. Johnson's hostility to it.

The next act in the drama was the Philadelphia Convention, called, by those who summoned it, the National Union Convention, which met in that city, August 14, 1866, responsive to a call signed by Messrs. A. W. Randall, J. R. Doolittle, O. H. Browning, Edgar Cowan, Charles Knapp, and Samuel Fowler, as Executive Committee of the National Union Club, and indorsed by Senators Norton, Nesmith, Dixon, and Hendricks. The object of this convention was to rally to the support of the President a considerable portion (a majority it was hoped) of both parties upon a so-called conservative platform, which should be sufficiently comprehensive to accommodate the Semi-Republicans, the War-Democrats, Peace-Democrats, and the half-repentant Rebels. General J. A. Dix was chosen temporary, and Senator Doolittle, permanent President of the Convention, and Mr. Henry J. Raymond, of the "New York Times," was made Chairman of the Committee on Resolutions.

At the opening of the Convention, General Couch, of Massachusetts, a former corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and Ex-Governor Orr, of South Carolina, came in arm-in-arm, "at which scene," said the reporters, "every eye was suffused with tears." The Convention, however, proved a failure. The elements were too discordant to mingle readily; and though Mr. Raymond proposed a very plausible and neatly worded address and series of resolutions, and Messrs. Doolittle, Cowan, and others, spoke very eloquently in favor of harmony and union on the President's policy, the influence of the affair on the nation was positively nothing, and the prime movers in it, who had been Republicans, found themselves read out of their own party, and not received cordially by the other.

Mr. Johnson had for some months been receiving delega

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tions of all sorts of men, and expressing his opinions on political questions with great freedom, though not always with consistency or coherence. On receiving a committee from the Philadelphia Convention, who, through their chairman, Hon. Reverdy Johnson, presented their proceedings, he made one of his characteristic speeches, full of references to himself, his feelings and emotions, his weeping at the touching scene in the Convention, and allusions to "the humble individual who was then addressing them," and spoke of Congress in these words: "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States, while in fact it is a Congress of only a part of the States. We have seen this Congress pretend to be for the Union, when its every step and act tended to perpetuate disunion, and make a disruption of the States inevitable. Instead of promoting reconciliation and harmony, its legislation has partaken of the character of penalties, retaliation, and revenge. This has been the course and the policy of one portion of your government."

Such unwarrantable charges against a coördinate department of the government, were not only in bad taste, but tended to bring the two into speedy collision; and it was due rather to the great patience and forbearance of Congress, than to any circumspection on the part of Mr. Johnson, that a revolution was not precipitated.

Then came that journey to Chicago, professedly to lay the corner-stone of the monument to the late Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, but really intended as a political canvass in behalf of what Mr. Johnson called his "policy." This disgraceful expedition, aptly termed, from one of his own pet expressions, "swinging round the circle," was to every loyal American the most humiliating exhibition ever made by any public man in this country.

Leaving Washington on the 28th of August, he proceeded northward, accompanied by Secretaries Seward and Welles, Postmaster-General Randall, General Grant, Admiral Farragut, and others, a part of whom, however, left the party some

time before it reached its destination. At every point of his progress, which was by way of Philadelphia, New York, Albany, the New York Central and Lake Shore roads to Chicago, and thence to St. Louis, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, he seized upon the opportunity to make a speech, and in many places was speedily involved in a wordy wrangle with the crowd, in which he invariably became angry, and exhibited a proficiency in the use of Billingsgate that might have done credit to a fishwoman, but was simply shameful in the chief magistrate of the United States. We cannot consent to defile our pages with specimens of the venom and abuse, which sometimes was almost blasphemous in its character, with which his twenty or thirty speeches during this tour were so freely interlarded. They are too fresh in the minds of the people, and have formed recently one of the counts in the indictment with which a long-suffering people have visited this public offender.

Yet the abusive portions of these speeches were the only parts of them which were readable. The dreary platitudes about "the humble individual who now addresses you," the ineffable conceit which on every occasion rehearsed the fact that "he had filled every station from alderman of a small country village to his present exalted station," the gravity with which he stated at every railway station that he "left the Constitution of the United States, and the flag with thirtysix stars in their hands," became at last so intolerably wearisome, that nobody could wade through the mass of dulluess.

The elections of the autumn of 1866, which immediately succeeded this tour, proved most conclusively the growing disgust of the people for the man who occupied the presidential chair. The Thirty-ninth Congress had been strongly Republican; the Fortieth was overwhelmingly so; and wherever Johnson had addressed the public, there the Republican majorities were unprecedented. The reconstruction measures which Congress had adopted, were sanctioned by the people, and others of a more decided character completing the work, were urged upon them.