On the 10th of May the President issued a proclamation declaring substantially that actual hostilities had ceased, and that "armed resistance to the authority of the Government in the insurrectionary States may be regarded as at an end." This great fact being officially recognized, the President found himself face to face with the momentous duty of bringing the eleven States of the Confederacy into active and harmonious relations with the Government of the Union. He had reached the point where he must take the first step in the serious task of Reconstruction, and the country awaited it with profound interest. He had in other official stations given distinct intimations of the conditions which he considered essential to the restoration of a rebel State to its place in the Union, but in the numerous speeches he had delivered since his accession to the Presidency he had studiously avoided a repetition of his former position, and had with equal care refrained from a public committal to any specific line of action. The manner in which the insurrectionary States should be dealt with at the close of hostilities had been the object of solicitous inquiry throughout the war. It was indeed often a question of angry disputation in Congress, in the press, and among the people. The tentative and somewhat speculative efforts in this field, which had been made or at least encouraged by Mr. Lincoln, had confused rather than solved the problem, and yet his action could not fail to exert an embarrassing and possibly a decisive influence upon the course of his successor. Difficult as it might have proved to Mr. Lincoln himself to go forward on the line he had marked out, it would obviously prove far more difficult to Mr. Johnson to maintain the same policy with the inevitable result of renewing the conflict with Congress which Mr. Lincoln had only allayed and postponed--not removed. A brief review of what Mr. Lincoln had done in the field of Reconstruction will give a more accurate knowledge of President Johnson's policy, which afterwards became the subject of prolonged and bitter controversy. Mr. Lincoln had naturally been anxious from the beginning of the war to re-establish civil government in any and every one of the Confederate States where actual resistance should cease. A military autocracy controlling people who were engaged in the ordinary avocations of life was altogether contrary to his views of expediency, altogether repugnant to his conceptions of right. At the end of the first year of the war (April, 1862) the rebel fortifications on the Lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans surrendered to the guns of Farragut, and not long afterwards a movement was made to re-establish in Louisiana a civil government that would be loyal to the Union. The first step was the election on the third of December, 1862, of Benjamin F. Flanders and Michael Hahn, old citizens of Louisiana, as Representatives in Congress.