Acting in accordance with his theories, Johnson vetoed the bill providing for the continuance of the Freedman’s Bureau, the Civil Rights Bill, the import of which was to place the Negroes on the same footing with the whites. Congress passed both of these bills over his veto. Regarding Civil Rights, President Johnson said: “I yield to no one in attachment to that rule of general suffrage which distinguished our policy as a nation, but there is a limit wisely observed hitherto which makes the ballot a privilege and a trust, and which requires of some classes a time suitable for probation and preparation. To give indiscriminately to a new class wholly unprepared by previous habits and opportunities to perform the trust it demands is to degrade it and finally to destroy its power.” Now the advisers of the President began to urge upon him the need of making more friends, so that he should have less opposition in the next Congress. As the summer of 1866 waned, they became more insistent on the importance of his making a tour through the principal cities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. The occasion presented was the laying of the cornerstone of the Chicago monument to Stephen A. Douglas arranged for September 6th. The tour started on August 28th and was the most unusual trip ever made by a president. Mrs. Patterson, her husband, Senator Patterson, Secretaries Seward and Welles, Mrs. Welles, Postmaster General Randall, General Grant, Admiral Farragut, and a group of sixty people accompanied him. He had continual ovation for three weeks. But his responses and speeches failed to please. They were considered campaign utterances, and campaigning was regarded as unbecoming to presidential etiquette. The criticisms did not deter him, however, for he never allowed himself to be governed by precedent when he considered principle involved. Throughout the tour his speeches were aggressive, even violent. He had much provocation, as the storm of impeachment proceedings was already brewing, and he read of himself frequently as a traitor who should be hanged. The fight with Congress grew in bitterness. The President retaliated by taking the stump in an effort to defeat his traducers for reëlection. His resentment expressed by his manner, he declared, “I would ask you, with all the pains this Congress has taken to poison the minds of their constituency against me, what has this Congress done? Have they done anything to restore the Union? No! On the contrary, they have done everything to prevent it.” “If my predecessor had lived,” the President stated in another address, “the vials of wrath from a mendacious press and subsidized gang of hirelings would have been poured upon him as upon me.”