The members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War returned on the evening of this crime from Richmond, having made an unsuccessful attempt to visit North Carolina for the purpose of taking testimony in regard to the Fort Fisher expedition. On the following morning they met, and addressed a formal note to Andrew Johnson, who had, while a Senator, served upon that committee, expressing the wish of his "old associates" to call upon him and acquaint him with "many things which they had seen and heard at Richmond." They were promptly admitted to his apartments at the Kirkwood House, and were among the first to talk freely with the man who had been so tragically made President of the newly-restored Union. Mr. Johnson had just been sworn into office by Chief Justice Chase in the presence of some of the Cabinet and a few Congressmen, and naturally the conversation chiefly turned upon the pursuit of the assassins, and the proper punishment of the men who had inspired or countenanced this crime, as well as of its actual committers. As a sequel of this conference, an important meeting was held on the following day (Sunday, April 16, 1865) in the President's rooms. By appointment Senators Chandler and Wade and John Covode (an original member of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, then a contestant for a seat in the House) called upon Mr. Johnson, and proceeded to consider with him what policy should be pursued toward the chiefs of the conquered rebellion. They believed that the public interest required that examples should be made of a few of the more guilty of the Southern traitors, and urged such a course upon the President. They found him--confronted as he was with the danger of assassination, and recollecting his own sufferings as a Southern Unionist--eager for measures of extreme rigor, and were compelled at the outset to seek to moderate a violence of intention on his part, which was certain to defeat the aim they were anxious to secure, namely: that of impressing the public with a sense of the justice as well as the severity of the punishment of deliberate and inexcusable treason. Andrew Johnson's disposition was to give to the contemplated proceedings rather a revengeful than a sternly retributive complexion. The relations of Mr. Chandler, Mr. Wade and Mr. Covode with their former fellow-committeeman were then exceedingly intimate, and they labored to restrain his vehemence and to direct his determination into a channel of action which should be just and not passionate, and should thus yield wholesome influences. It had been suggested that Davis and other fugitive rebels should be allowed to escape to Mexico or Europe, and the question of their punishment thus evaded; this plan was promptly condemned by all the participants in the conference, and there was a general agreement that the leaders of the rebellion should be arrested as rapidly as possible and held to answer for their offenses.