At the close of the war, he regarded the southern states as conquered territory, to be treated as such, and his ideas of treatment seem to have been founded upon those of the Middle Ages. He wished to confiscate the property of all Confederates; endeavored to impeach President Johnson, who was trying to enforce a system of reconstruction which was at least better than that which Stevens advocated. For a time he seemed to suffer from a very vertigo of hatred, which ate into his soul and destroyed him. The plan of reconstruction adopted by Congress was an embodiment of his ideas; but Johnson was acquitted of the charges Stevens brought against him, and Stevens's poison, as it were, turned in upon himself and killed him. His last request, that his body be buried in an obscure private cemetery, because public cemeteries excluded negroes, shows the man's unbalanced condition, the length to which his ideas had led him. Charles Sumner, who was to the Senate much what Stevens was to the House, although a larger and better-balanced man, was a typical Bostonian and inheritor of the New England conscience, which, of course, meant that he was opposed through and through to slavery. He was a successful lawyer, and as his sentiments were well known, he was chosen to succeed Webster when the latter wavered on the anti-slavery question, and threw some pledges of assistance to the South. There was never any doubt about Sumner's position, no sign of wavering or coquetting with the enemy, and in 1856, he was assaulted by a southern senator and so severely injured that three years passed before he could resume his seat. He did so in time to oppose any compromise with slavery or the slave power, which the threatening attitude of the South had almost scared the North into considering, and urged the immediate emancipation of the slaves. When this had been accomplished, his first thought was to make sure that the slaves would remain free, and he began the contest for negro suffrage, as the only guarantee of negro freedom, which he finally won. In the reconstruction period following the war, he was inevitably an ally of Thaddeus Stevens, though the latter far surpassed him in vindictiveness toward the South.