Mr. Johnson believed, as did Mr. Lincoln, that the revolted States were still States of the Union--that all the pretended acts of secession were null and void, and that the loyal people therein had the right to reconstruct their State Governments on the basis proposed to them first by Mr. Lincoln, and after him by Mr. Johnson, and thus the right to representation in the General Government. It was upon this question that parties divided during the reconstruction period. Mr. Lincoln, foreseeing danger in such a division, was anxious to bring those States into such relation that the people generally would consider them as virtually in the Union, without reference to the abstract question. It was with this view, undoubtedly, that he advocated the admission of Members and Senators whenever one-tenth of the voting population of 1860 should organize State Governments and ask for readmission. He would not only not countenance, but repelled the doctrine of "State Suicide," as it was called, and which came to characterize the methods of reconstruction subsequently adopted. It is true, that on many occasions Mr. Johnson charged that the Congress was only a Congress of part of the States, and that its acts were therefore without validity. Yet he continued to execute those laws, and what to him was a very unpleasant duty, the law which set aside the State Governments organized under his own direction, so that notwithstanding his violent denunciations of the acts of Congress, and his personal opinions, he did not presume to act upon them. Angry and undignified language was uttered on both sides. Many of his speeches were violent and in bad taste and temper. So were a great many speeches uttered by senators and members of the House, and those bodies too often acted upon them. It is therefore but repeating recorded history to say that Mr. Johnson was earnestly seeking to carry out Mr. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, which was upon consultation with his entire Cabinet, more especially with Mr. Stanton, adopted by him as the basis for the restoration of the revolted States. Yet, with these facts of record, that action was afterwards assailed by the Republican leaders in and out of Congress, who assumed to have become Mr. Lincoln's executors in the work of reconstruction, as not only an abandonment of the plan instituted by him, but a surrender of the issues fought out and the results accomplished by the war just closed notwithstanding very many of these critics of Mr. Johnson had but a few months before criticised Mr. Lincoln with quite equal severity for his suggestion of this same method of restoration. Nor will it suffice to say that, though professing submission and loyalty, the people of the South were still hostile to the Union, and that there was no safety there for Union men. It is true that there came to be violence and disorder there upon the rejection by Congress of Mr. Johnson's plan of restoration.