Upon the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865 the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, became President. He was a Southern man, and as one of the Senators from the Southern State of Tennessee he had refused to go with his State in her secession from the Union. To this he owed his association on the Presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln at the election in 1864. He was no more and no less opposed to slavery in the abstract than President Lincoln, of whom it is well known that he regarded his own now famous proclamation of 1863 freeing the slaves in the seceded States, as an illegal concession to the Anti-Slavery feeling of the North and of Europe, and that he spoke of it with undisguised contempt, as a 'Pope's bull against the comet.' Like Mr. Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was devoted to the Union, but he was a Constitutional Democrat in his political opinions, and the Civil War having ended in the defeat of the Confederacy, he gradually settled down to his constitutional duty, as President of the United States, towards the States which had formed the Confederacy. This earned for him the bitter hostility of the then dominant majority in both Houses of Congress, led by a man of unbridled passions and of extraordinary energy, Thaddeus Stevens, a representative from Pennsylvania, a sort of American Couthon, infirm of body but all compact of will. It was the purpose of this majority to humiliate and chastise, not to conciliate, the defeated South. Already, under President Lincoln, this purpose had brought the leaders of the majority more than once into collision with the Executive. Under President Johnson they forced a collision with the Veto power of the President, by two unconstitutional bills, one attainting the whole people of the South, and the other aimed at the authority of the Executive over his officers. In the policy thus developed they had the co-operation of the Secretary at War, Mr. Stanton, and during the recess of Congress in August 1867 it became apparent that with his assistance they meant to subjugate the Executive. President Johnson quickly brought matters to an issue. He first, during the recess, suspended Mr. Stanton from the War Office, putting General Grant in charge of it, and upon the reassembling of Congress in December 1867 'removed' him, and directed him to hand over his official portfolio to General Thomas, appointed to fill the place _ad interim_. Thereupon the majority of the House carried through that body a resolution of impeachment, prepared, by a committee, the necessary articles, and brought the President to trial before the Senate, constituted as a court for 'high crimes and misdemeanours.' Two of the articles of impeachment were founded upon disrespect alleged to have been publicly shown by the President to Congress. The President, by his counsel, among whom were Mr. Evarts, since then Secretary of State, and now a Senator for New York, and Mr. Stanberry, an Attorney-General