General Schurz's investigation had been made at the special request of the President. He had spent three months in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The President, when appointing him, had said that his own policy of Reconstruction was merely experimental and subject to change if it did not lead to satisfactory results. Schurz says in his "Reminiscences?"[81] that when he returned to Washington from his journey he had much difficulty in procuring an interview with the President; that the latter received him coldly and did not ask him for the results of his investigation; and that when he (Schurz) said that he intended to write a report, the President said that he need not take that trouble on his account. Schurz was convinced that the President wished to suppress his testimony and he resolved that he should not do so. He accordingly wrote the report and sent it in, with the accompanying documents, and let his friends in the Senate know that he had done so. On the 12th of December the Senate, on Sumner's motion, called for the report. The President did not respond immediately. In the mean time he had had a conversation with General Grant whose views were for the most part in accord with his own, and he asked the latter to communicate the information he had gained during his Southern tour in order to make it a part of his reply to the Senate Resolution. The reply occupies only one page and a half of McPherson's "Reconstruction." Schurz's consists of forty-four printed pages of text and fifty-eight pages of appendix; Schurz considered this the best paper he had ever written on a public matter, and there can be no doubt that it had great influence in Congress and on the Republican party. Yet the brief report of Grant was the sounder of the two. Indeed, Schurz himself in his later years had doubts as to the validity of his own conclusions.[82] Schurz's conclusions may be summarized thus: If nothing were necessary but to restore the machinery of government in the states lately in rebellion in point of form, the movements made to that end by the people of the South might be considered satisfactory. But if it is required that the Southern people should also accommodate themselves to the result of the war in point of spirit, those movements fall far short of what must be insisted upon.... The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of society, and all independent state legislation will share the tendency to make him such. The ordinances abolishing slavery, passed by the conventions under pressure of circumstances, will not be looked upon as barring the establishment of a new form of servitude.