Among my friends in Washington there were different opinions as to how the striking change in President Johnson's attitude had been brought about. Some told me that during the summer the White House had been fairly besieged by Southern men and women of high social standing, who had told the President that the only element of trouble in the South consisted of a lot of fanatical abolitionists who excited the negroes with all sorts of dangerous notions, and that all would be well if he would only restore the Southern State government as quickly as possible according to his own plan as laid down in the North Carolina proclamation, and that he was a great man to whom they looked up as their savior. It was now thought that Mr. Johnson, the plebeian who before the war had been treated with undisguised contempt by the slaveholding aristocracy, could not withstand the subtle flattery of the same aristocracy when they flocked around him as humble suppliants cajoling his vanity. I went to work at my general report with the utmost care. My statements of fact were invariably accompanied by the sources of my information, my testimony being produced in the language of my informants. I scrupulously avoided exaggeration and cultivated sober and moderate forms of expression. It gives me some satisfaction now to say that none of those statements of fact has ever been effectually controverted. I cannot speak with the same assurance of my conclusions and recommendations, for they were matters, not of knowledge, but of judgment. In the concluding paragraph of my report I respectfully suggested to the President that he advise Congress to send one or more investigating committees into the Southern States to inquire for themselves into the actual condition of things before taking final and irreversible action, I sent the completed document to the President on November 22, asking him at the same time to permit me to publish it, on my sole responsibility and in such a manner as would preclude the imputation that the President approved the whole or any part of it. To this request I never received a reply. _Congress and General Grant's Report_ Congress met early in December. At once the Republican majority in both houses rose in opposition to President Johnson's plan of reconstruction. Even before the President's message was read, the House of Representatives, upon the motion of Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, passed a resolution providing for a joint committee of both houses to inquire into the condition of the "States lately in rebellion," which committee should thereupon report, "by bill or otherwise," whether, in its judgment, those States, or any of them, were entitled to be represented in either House of Congress. To this resolution the Senate subsequently assented. Thus Congress took the matter of the reconstruction of the late rebel States as to its final consummation into its own hands.