On the 29th of May the new President commenced the Sisyphus business of Southern reconstruction; first rolling to the top of the hill the stone of a provisional government for North Carolina, which, of course, rolled back again, covered by the old shells of the Confederacy. By the middle of July he had tugged up the same stone under different names, as Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, only to find it rolling down speedily, hurting the colored people and Union whites, and creating a butternut-colored atmosphere all around it. The entertainment was too often repeated to be jocose, except to Mr. Johnson, who believed in a detached idea industriously pursued. The delegates to Congress under his scheme, who presented themselves at Washington, in December, 1865, were found to be all of the saffron complexion and hue. They had already forgotten that there had been any war, and only remembered their ancient rights, and were ready to draw back pay, or anything else back, except declarations of not having been in the least wrong in the late little unpleasantness. Congress read their own privileges, rights, and duties in quite a different way; declared their exclusive right, as representatives of the people, to deal with the new puzzles; passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill for the protection of the colored property of the South, the Civil Rights Bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. While they believed in the dead past burying its dead, they did not embrace the idea of its burying the living with them. Mr. Johnson now studied the Art of Vetoing Made Easy; and from his cross-readings began to add immensely to the American official archives by Xanthippe messages, whose unlovely words have greatly embossed the rich cabinets of vituperative specimens, for a long time accumulating at Washington. [Illustration: THE IRISH REPUBLIC IN AMERICA. (p. 529) ] In July, 1866, a riot was created in New Orleans,—the counterpart of the pat-riot disturbances in New York three years before,—in which thirty-four loyal colored and three loyal colorless people were added to the Crescent cemeteries. The citizens who had participated in the bonfires and illuminations, on the arrival of Farragut and Porter in 1862 were mercifully spared. In August following, the acting President, accompanied by Mr. Seward,—whose wonderful pen through the silent diplomatic struggle abroad, which ran parallel with the armed strife at home, cannot be alluded to with scant praise,—set out for Chicago, to lay the corner-stone of a monument to the powerful dike-breaker. Never was a journey so long. The road thither seemed to have got intoxicated and reeled and tumbled all over the West; while the jerky speeches, hiccuping along the wavy ways, endeavored in vain to catch up with and to find the President.