There is no question now in any calm and impartial mind that the Senate acted most inconsiderately, not to say wrongfully, in passing that resolution. The situation was a perfectly plain one. The President and Stanton could not work together, since they had lost all confidence in each other. Common-sense and common decency required in such a case the retirement of the subordinate. The Senate itself had committed itself to this view in the discussion and votes upon the Tenure-of-Office bill, in its original form and in its final form. General Grant, the man who stood first in the confidence of the whole people, was in possession of the War Office. He had held it already nearly six months, and had in that short time improved the administration of it very greatly. At the end of the six months, at farthest, the President was held by the law of 1795, a law whose constitutionality {164} he did not dispute, to make a nomination to the Senate of a permanent incumbent. The Senate would then be able to prevent the appointment of any person to the office who did not have the confidence of the Senate and the country. No possible harm could thus have come to the country from acquiescing in Stanton's suspension, and it is hard to see that anything but harm did come to it in not doing so. No perfectly fair and unprejudiced mind could have failed to see that then; but the radical Republicans--and most of the Republicans in Congress at that moment were radical, or at least intensely partisan--were bent upon attacking and destroying the President in any way they could. They were ready to lay traps for him, and then to so excite him by encroachments upon the prerogatives and the dignity of his office as to make him fall into them. They were determined to sustain Stanton against the President, the subordinate against his lawful superior, simply because they despised the President. They claimed that the welfare of the country demanded it, and most of them probably thought so, but everybody can see the fallacy of that now, and anybody fit to be a Senator of the United States ought to have been able to see it then. [Sidenote: Criticism of General Grant's act.]