Within three months after his inauguration, accordingly, Johnson had set the forces going throughout the South by which he hoped that peace and tranquillity might be established, and the Union once more become an undivided whole. In the execution of this most important work, he had not asked for the co-operation or advice of Congress. Confident of the correctness of his ideas, feeling sure that they were only the logical results of a true interpretation of the Constitution, he pursued his policy of reconstruction. In so doing he was also consistently following the path marked out by his predecessor. His plan was essentially that which Lincoln had advocated and attempted to carry into execution. But we have seen that even under a man enjoying such universal confidence as did Lincoln, the country viewed with distrust, and Congress openly resented, a policy which seemed to commit to a recently insurrectionary people the whole responsibility for proper reconstruction, requiring from them no surety for sincerity save an oath which all knew would be regarded by the majority as a mere form with little significance. The same policy when adopted by Johnson was naturally looked upon with still more suspicion. Lincoln was a man of tact and judgment, who was capable of seeing and confessing a mistake, whose sole object was to do that which, all things being considered, should seem best for the Union. Johnson, on the contrary, from his natural arbitrariness and narrowness, was a man who held most tenaciously to his views, had little consideration for the views of others, and who was always determined that his own way should be carried out. Under such circumstances it would have been little short of marvelous, had he been able to carry out a policy in itself disliked, without sooner or later coming into collision with those who disapproved his theory. The provisional governors appointed were not slow in carrying out the provisions of the proclamations, and conventions met in the various states as follows: Mississippi, August 14; Alabama, September 12; South Carolina, September 13; North Carolina, October 2; Georgia, October 25; Florida, October 25; and Texas in March, 1866. In all these conventions the secession ordinances were repealed, annulled or declared null and void,[54] and slavery was declared abolished. All but Mississippi and South Carolina repudiated the rebel debt, and all but Mississippi and Texas ratified the 13th Amendment. Meanwhile Johnson made liberal use of the pardoning power, and large numbers of the excepted classes were thus restored to all the privileges of citizens of the United States. The reconstruction was very rapid; so rapid, as Johnson himself said, that he could scarcely realize it; "it appears like a dream."