“It is easy in Congress and from the pulpit, North and South to talk about polygamy and Brigham Young and debauchery of various kinds; but there is also one great fact that four millions of people lived in open and notorious concubinage. The time has come when you must correct this thing. You know what I say is true and you must do something to correct it by example as well as words and professions.... I trust in God the time may come when you shall be gathered together in a clime and country suited to you, should it be found that the two races cannot get along together.”[182] It is almost idle, after the above, to state that Johnson was absolutely devoid of the kindly tact and vulgar humor, which had so endeared Lincoln, the supplest politician of his time, to the coarse mass of the electorate, as he had voiced for it, its thoughts in a tongue it could understand and appreciate. When we reflect, that Johnson, a Southern man, the Vice President coming from the conquered South, was handed the reins at the moment when the victorious North, flushed with conquest, saw its great leader, identified with the West, hurled from his high position to bloody death, at the hands of a murderer, who proclaimed his sympathy with the vanquished South, the immensity of the difficulties about to confront him begins to appear. In addition, he, himself, before being steadied by the responsibilities of the office, had “breathed threatenings and slaughter.” In a proclamation, claiming that Jefferson Davis and others had incited, concocted and procured the atrocious murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, ex-President Jefferson Davis had been held up to obloquy and, upon his capture, imprisoned and chained; but what was infinitely more horrible, Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville, was made a human sacrifice, under circumstances which have left an ineffaceable blot upon all in any way responsible for making him the scapegoat for the very effective military policy which refused the Confederate offer to exchange prisoners. If it took the magnanimity and fortitude of Seward to point out the method by which the Union might be saved from the fate in which the Congressional conspirators meant to involve it, for their own immediate ends, and if, in this hacked victim of the assassins, Johnson found the anchor by which he rode out the storm which burst upon him; yet it should be remembered that nothing but the sturdiest integrity and most indomitable courage could have nerved Johnson to even attempt the struggle, he fought out to the end. Conditions in the South were appalling. Bled to a whiteness, which not even France experienced in the Great War; with her labor system hopelessly disorganized by the Freedman’s Bureau; not only by its methods but by the openly announced suggestions of its head, General Howard, that the landholders should be compelled by