On the same day, Edwin M. Stanton wrote a note to the President saying that inasmuch as impeachment had failed he had relinquished the War Department and had left the contents thereof in charge of the senior Assistant Adjutant-General. He then retired to his own home broken in health by hard labor and clouded in reputation by his retention of a place in the Cabinet in defiance of his chief. Not even success in maintaining his position could excuse such an act. Failure made it a glaring misdemeanor. An attempt has been made to shift the responsibility for his action to the shoulders of Sumner and his other backers in the Senate, who advised him to "stick." Undoubtedly they did so advise, and undoubtedly they believed, and persuaded him to believe, that it was a patriotic duty to commit a glaring breach of good manners and to persist in it for months; but the responsibility for such an act could not be assumed by other persons. Moreover, if it was a breach of the Constitution for the Senate to forbid the President to choose his own cabinet, as Stanton himself had affirmed, it was a breach of the Constitution for him to coöperate with the Senate in doing so. The glory of the trial [says Mr. Rhodes][111] was the action of the seven recusant Senators.... The average Senator who hesitated finally gave his voice with the majority, but these seven, in conscientiousness and delicacy of moral fibre, were above any average, and in refusing to sacrifice their ideas of justice to a popular demand, which in this case was neither insincere nor unenlightened, they showed a degree of courage than which we know none higher. Hard as was their immediate future they have received their meed from posterity, their monument in the admiring tribute of all who know how firm they stood in an hour of supreme trial.