I remained at the head of the _Tribune_ office in Washington, according to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me--I might almost say urged upon me--by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the "States lately in rebellion." _The Beginnings of the Struggle_ I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic, for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me that his personal experience with the President had been very much like mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy." From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr. Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies, which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious. [Illustration: TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER]