There were two theories rife in the Senate and in the country, respecting this trial. One was that impeachment was a judicial proceeding where charges of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors were to be alleged and proved; the Senators sitting as judges, hearing testimony and argument, and voting guilty or not guilty. This opinion was generally accepted at first, both in and out of Congress, and was the correct one. The other was that impeachment was a political proceeding which the whole people were as competent to decide as the Senate. This was the view taken by Charles Sumner and avowed by him in his written opinion while sitting as one of the sworn judges to vote guilty or not guilty, and it came to be the opinion prevailing in the Republican party generally before the case was ended. According to this view it was a question for the people to decide in their character as an unsworn "multitudinous jury." No method of arriving at, or of recording, their verdict was suggested or deemed necessary. To a person holding this view the trial itself was logically a waste of time, since a decision could have been reached without a scrap of testimony, or a single speech, on either side. The trial lasted from the 5th of March to the 16th of May, and the heat and fury of the contest both in and out of Congress became more intense from day to day. The impeachers lost ground in the estimation of the sober-minded and reflecting classes by their intemperate language, by their frantic efforts to bring outside pressure to bear upon Senators, and especially by their refusal to admit testimony offered to show that the President's intent was not to defy the law, but to get a judicial decision as to what the law was. The Chief Justice ruled that testimony to prove intent was admissible, and Senator Sherman asked to have it admitted, but it was excluded by a majority vote. Testimony to prove that Stanton advised the President that the Tenure-of-Office Law was unconstitutional and that he aided in writing the veto message was excluded by the same vote. Gideon Welles, under date April 18,[106] says that Sumner, who had previously moved to admit all testimony offered, absented himself when it was proposed to call the Cabinet officers as witnesses. Monday, May 11, the case was closed and the Senate retired for deliberation. The session was secret, but the views of Senators, so far as expressed, leaked out. "Grimes boldly denounced all the articles," says Welles, "and the whole proceeding. Of course he received the indignant censure of all radicals; but Trumbull and Fessenden, who followed later, came in for even more violent denunciation and more wrathful abuse."