Mr. Lincoln was succeeded by the Vice-President, Mr. Andrew Johnson, who, in the first moments of excitement which followed Lincoln’s murder, charged Mr. Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the South, with being Booth’s accomplices. These charges, however, were not generally credited, because it was clear that the life of Lincoln, whose policy was notoriously one of clemency and moderation, was quite as precious to the conquered States, as to their conquerors. But undoubtedly the angry passions which Booth’s crime had stimulated, increased the difficulty of reorganising the territory now held by the Federal troops. To admit the Southern States to the Union with their old rights of sovereignty and autonomy as if nothing had happened was impossible. The negroes, though free, were unenfranchised, and therefore at the mercy of their old masters. But the negroes had bled and suffered for the Union during the war, and they could not be abandoned now. Moreover, Lincoln’s proclamation abolishing slavery gave them an implied promise of protection from subsequent oppression. But then the American Constitution contained no provision for dealing with the difficulty which the war had created. To enfranchise with a stroke of the pen a vast ignorant servile population, which had been demoralised by slavery, was fraught with the utmost peril, not only to American democracy, but to American civilisation. Again, the States themselves had always determined the conditions of enfranchisement. As sovereign communities they had the clearest right to organise their own internal administration free from all interference from the Federal authorities, who had no power over them, save that of seeing that they adopted a republican form of government. The first step taken was to organise the Freedman’s Bureau with agents all over the South with the object of protecting the negroes from injustice and oppression. But President Johnson had spent his life in the Slave State of Tennessee, and he had many sympathies with the slave-owners. Taking his stand on the letter of the Constitution, he refused to sanction those methods of reconstruction which Congress adopted, and sent military governors to rule the conquered States, until their permanent government was organised. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery in the United States was carried in June. But the President vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, his veto being overridden by the majority in Congress, in which, however, the Southern States were not yet represented. In a word, the President was soon in open conflict with the Republican majority that had carried the country through the long and bloody war. [Illustration: BIARRITZ.]