waiting has cost the country more than can be told. Meanwhile the President proceeded in transgression. There is nothing of usurpation he has not attempted. Beginning with assumption of all power in the Rebel States, he has shrunk from nothing in maintenance of this unparalleled assumption. This is a plain statement of fact. Timid at first, he grew bolder and bolder. He saw too well that his attempt to substitute himself for Congress in the work of Reconstruction was sheer usurpation, and therefore, by his Secretary of State, did not hesitate to announce that “it must be distinctly understood that the restoration will be _subject to the decision of Congress_.”[194] On two separate occasions, in July and September, 1865, he confessed the power of Congress over the subject; but when Congress came together in December, the confessor of Congressional power found that he alone had this great prerogative. According to his new-fangled theory, Congress had nothing to do but admit the States with governments instituted through his will alone. It is difficult to measure the vastness of this usurpation, involving as it did a general nullification. Strafford was not bolder, when, speaking for Charles the First, he boasted that “the King’s little finger was heavier than the loins of the Law”;[195] but these words helped the proud minister to the scaffold. No monarch, no despot, no sultan, could claim more than an American President; for he claimed all. By his edict alone governments were organized, taxes levied, and even the franchises of the citizen determined. Had this assumption of power been incidental, for the exigency of the moment, as under pressure of war, and especially to serve human rights, to which before his elevation the President had professed such vociferous devotion, it might have been pardoned. It would have passed into the chapter of unauthorized acts which a patriot people had condoned. But it was the opposite in every particular. Beginning and continuing in usurpation, it was hateful beyond pardon, because it sacrificed Unionists, white and black, and was in the interest of the Rebellion, and of Rebels who had been in arms against their country.