Some of Stanton's friends have tried to make out that but for Stanton's resistance and the impeachment, and its nearness to success, Johnson would have appointed a tool of his own to the War Office and have rode rough-shod over the laws of the land, and that he was frightened out of this purpose, and frightened into an implied agreement with certain Senators and General Schofield that the Reconstruction laws should be executed as Stanton understood them, and not as the President understood them. There is little ground for {193} any such assumptions. There is certainly none in the character of the men whom the President asked to take the War Office, Grant, Sherman and Ewing; and it must be remembered that through Mr. Stanbery, in the case of Mississippi vs. Johnson, he had long before announced to the Southerners that his opposition to the Reconstruction Acts ceased with his unsuccessful veto of them, and that he should execute them both in letter and in spirit. It was Republican Senators who suggested to the President's counsel the nomination of General Schofield, a man entirely friendly with the President and acceptable to him. Neither the President nor the President's counsel approached any Senator with the proposition. It was the Republican Senators who were frightened, rather than the President or his counsel. These Senators knew that the law and the evidence were with the President, and that the Republican party was on trial, as much so as the President; and they knew that, if the Republican Senate should, upon the showing made by the President's counsel of the law and the evidence in the case, convict the President and remove him from office, the party would stand arraigned before the people for having destroyed the constitutional balance between the executive and the legislature in order to gain a partisan end. They recognized the dilemma into which the hot-headed leaders of the party in the House of Representatives had, by their hasty impeachment procedure, brought the party, and they were very much relieved to secure any understanding with the President's counsel whereby the chance of averting the catastrophe to the party, as well as to the country, might be increased. The suspicion that Mr. Stanton was playing his part for the purpose of securing the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1868, rather than from any motives of disinterested {194} patriotism, has about as little foundation as has the theory of salutary terror, produced by the impeachment, controlling the President's subsequent actions against his own preconceived plans and purposes. Both of these speculations are no valid parts of the history of this great transaction. What we have as certain facts are that the judgment was an acquittal, that it was rendered in accordance with law and evidence, and that it preserved the constitutional balance between the executive and the legislature in the governmental system of the country; and that