In the West the hostility to the President and the support of the policy of Congress were even more demonstrative than in the East. All the prominent Republicans of Ohio were on the stump and the canvass was extraordinarily heated, even for a State which has had an animated contest every year since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Governor Morton's candidacy for the Senate gave great earnestness to the struggle in Indiana, while Senator Chandler not only rallied Michigan to the necessity of giving an immense majority, but with his tremendous vitality added nerve and zeal to every contest in the North-western States. The whole result proved to be one of commanding influence on the future course of public events. The Republicans plainly saw that the triumph of President Johnson meant a triumph of the Democratic party under an _alias_, that the first-fruits of such a victory would be the re-establishment of the late Confederate States in full political power inside the Union, and that in a little more than five years from the firing upon Sumter, and a little more than one year from the surrender of Lee, the same political combination which had threatened the destruction of the Union would be recalled to its control. The importance, therefore, of the political struggle of 1866 cannot be overestimated. It has, perhaps, been underestimated. If the contest had ended in a victory for the Democrats the history of the subsequent years would, in all probability, have been radically different. There would have been no further amendment to the Constitution, there would have been no conditions of reconstruction, there would have been such a neutralization of the anti-slavery amendment as would authorize and sustain all the State laws already passed for the practical re-enslavement of the negro, with such additional enactments as would have made them cruelly effective. With the South re-admitted and all its representatives acting in cordial co-operation with the Northern Democrats, the result must have been a deplorable degradation of the National character and an ignoble surrender to the enemies of the Union, thenceforth to be invested with the supreme direction of its government.