The result of this exposé probably will be that the Georgia question will at last, after a year's delay, filled with this lying and intrigue and corruption, be settled at the outset, by handing the State Government back to the electors on the same terms as Virginia, and letting the "Bullock faction" go home and find some means of gaining an honest livelihood.... We cannot pass from this affair, however, without bearing hearty testimony to the services which Mr. Trumbull has, by his attitude in it from the very beginning, rendered to truth, justice, good government, and civilization. He has made every honest man, North and South, his debtor, not for being able, for this he cannot help, but for being bold, and hitting hard. "By Time," says Hosea Biglow, "I du like a man that ain't afeared!" FOOTNOTES: [98] _Diary of Gideon Welles_, III, 10-12. [99] Boutwell, _Reminiscences_, II, 108. [100] This was the second time that Sumner had shunted the nation in the direction he desired it to go; the first time was when he filibustered the Louisiana Bill to death at the end of the Thirty-ninth Congress. Edward L. Pierce, his biographer and eulogist, writing in the early nineties, says rather dubiously: "For weal or woe, whether it was well or not for the black race and the country, it is to Sumner's credit or discredit as a statesman that suffrage, irrespective of race or color, became fixed and universal in the American system." (_Memoir and Letters_, I, 228.) [101] _Fifty Years of Public Service_, by Shelby M. Cullom, p. 146. [102] _Diary of Gideon Welles_, II, 484. CHAPTER XX IMPEACHMENT Early in 1867, Congress passed an act, originating in the Senate, to prevent the President from removing, without the consent of the Senate, any office-holders whose appointment required confirmation by that body. In its inception it was not intended to include members of the Cabinet, but merely to protect postmasters, collectors, and other appointees of that grade, whom the President, in his stump speech at St. Louis, had declared his intention to "kick out." Accordingly a clause was inserted excluding Cabinet officers from the operation of the measure.