Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2: From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860Blaine, James Gillespie
History
Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2: From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860
Blaine, James Gillespie
United States -- History; United States -- History -- 1865-1898
transferring the government of States to the control of men who had
already shown themselves capable of desperate deeds. In their wrathful
zeal for justice they would hear no apology and no defense of the
President. They held him as an accomplice in the crime,--as one having
in advance a guilty knowledge of the pre-arranged assassination. In
every way in which public indignation can be expressed, in every form
in which public anger can vent itself, the loyal people of the Northern
states manifested their feelings, and did not spare in their bitter
denunciations the personal character of the President or the
unspeakable guilt of his Southern supporters.
The bloody tragedy of midsummer, which had weighed down the people with
a sense of the gravest solicitude, was followed by what might well be
termed its comedy. During the early spring the President had accepted
an invitation from the citizens of Chicago to attend the ceremony of
laying a corner-stone for a monument to be erected to the memory of
Stephen A. Douglas. The date fixed for the President's visit was
September 6th, and he left Washington on the 28th of August,
accompanied by Secretary Welles, Postmaster-general Randall,
General Grant, Admiral Farragut, by a considerable number of army
officers and by a complement of private secretaries and newspaper
reporters,--apparently intending to convert the journey into a political
canvass. Mr. Seward joined the company in New York. The somewhat
ludicrous effect produced by combining a series of turbulent partisan
meetings to be addressed by the President with the solemn duty of paying
respect to the memory of a dead statesman, did not fail to have its
effect upon the appreciative mind of his countrymen, and from the
beginning to the end of the tour there was a popular alternation between
harsh criticism and contemptuous raillery of Mr. Johnson's conduct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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