The statesmanship of George Bancroft did not govern very long. The irony of fate decreed that within two months of the time when such words as the foregoing were uttered by the most competent critics in the land, the President of whom they were spoken should be in bitter strife with the majority of his own party, and within two years be facing trial by impeachment. Andrew Johnson was born of a fighting race and in a region of fighters. He shared the poverty and ignorance of the mountaineers of East Tennessee. Hard labor was his portion in youth and early manhood. He was a tailor by trade.[79] He could read, but could not write until he was married, when the latter accomplishment was imparted to him by his wife. With this kind of start he became, like Abraham Lincoln, and in much the same way and facing the same difficulties, a public speaker, and acquired by steady practice the faculty of making his meaning clear to the commonest understanding. When he found himself in the Senate of the United States, shortly before the outbreak of secession, he had few if any superiors as a debater in that body, and the Union had not a more unflinching defender, North or South. Alexander H. Stephens, a competent judge, considered Johnson's speech against secession the best one made in the Senate during the whole controversy. Secretary Seward, who accompanied him in his "swing around the circle" in 1866, said that he was then the best stump speaker in the country. Certainly the speech with which he began that tour at New York on the 29th of August was a great one. It fills five pages of McPherson's "History of Reconstruction." It was extemporaneous, but faultless in manner and matter; it was charged with the spirit of patriotism, and it will bear comparison with anything in the annals of American polemics. If he had made no other speech in that campaign the results might have been far different, and the Union party which elected him might have avoided the breach which soon became remediless. The first blow leading to this breach was struck by Sumner in the Senate, December 19, 1865, when he referred to a message of the President, of the previous day, on the condition of the South, as a "whitewashing message" akin to that of President Pierce on the affairs of Kansas. When Reverdy Johnson deprecated such an assault on the President of the United States, Sumner replied that it was "no assault at all," but after two other Senators (Doolittle and Dixon) had said that it was the same as accusing the President of falsifying, he replied that he did not so intend it, but he did not withdraw or modify it.