During the four years of the war for the preservation of the Union, there had been more than twenty-four hundred engagements of greater or lesser importance. In all, 2,600,000 men had been enlisted in the Federal armies, and while some of the records of the Confederate forces were destroyed, it has been estimated that they put more than a million men under arms. The conclusion of the review sent back to civil life a vast host. All but a standing army of 15,000 men were disbanded. The time had now come when President Johnson’s task assumed herculean proportions. Secession was abolished, slavery was an institution of the past, the Negroes were free, and the indestructibility of the Union and the supremacy of the national government were definitely and completely established. With the conspirators captured and on trial, public attention turned with redoubled interest to the political situation and with concentrated scrutiny to the attitude of the new Executive toward the problems that developed and multiplied daily about his head in stabilizing the government and reviving long-neglected and stagnant industries. Before him lay the greatest responsibility and the greatest opportunity that had ever confronted any executive of the United States. From a huge disorganized fluid mass of opposed human elements, each committed to and allied to some of the varied forces that made up the national chaos, he must either bring reorganization, a harmonious welding of the mighty forces into a structure of government to endure, or must suffer retrogression, the tragedy of dissolution and national eclipse. Medusa-headed were the disrupting units, and legion the demands, needs, and appeals for attention and action. It was a crucial period, when legal astuteness, super-statesmanship, extraordinary political acumen, expert diplomacy, unbiased vision, indomitable courage, and, above all, unswerving patriotism and Gibraltar-like strength to hold to convictions were the qualifications needed to control the rocking ship of state. To form any just estimate of the administration of Andrew Johnson in his accidentally conferred office through such an epochal period, one must first get a concept of the man--his background of ancestry, environment, education, and former achievements. The whole story of his life and public service reveals one of the most notable examples of self-development in our national history. Never was man more entirely captain of his own soul and master of his own destiny. Adversity surrounded him with every baffling agency in his childhood, and opportunity forgot him in his boyhood. But the fates that presided at his birth showered him liberally with pugnacity, energy, determination, and unlimited ambition which, though late in awakening, drove him unceasingly until the end of his life.