Page:Lives of the presidents in words of one syllable (1903).djvu/109

 When the war was at an end, in May, 1865, the men who had fought were paid off and sent home. They went back to their own work and took it up in a prompt way, with the thought to help them that they had done their best for the Land of the Stars and Stripes.

John-son's aims came to be far from those which most men thought he held when he was put in the chair. He tried to bring the states of the South back on a plan of his own. Con-gress did not like his plan, and, in spite of him, made laws which it thought would make it safe to let those states come back. By the end of John-son's term 7 states had come in with those laws.

John-son did much harm, and said words that were not wise, so that there was fear on the part of some that he would bring the whole land to shame. A move was made to take him from his post. A change of one vote in the Sen-ate would have put him out of the chair.

His self will and rash speech were the prime cause of all this strife. He did not care for the blacks, and he did not see that his plan would put the South in the hands of men of the caste he did not like. Con-gress said that all men both black and white must have the same rights, and the plan of Con-gress won at last, though at the end of John-son's term four of the states that had gone out of the Un-ion were still out. But these four came back in 1870.

At the end of our war the French troops held Mex-i-co. The Un-i-ted States made a strong move to have them leave, and at last France said it would be done. The man at the head, Max-i-mil-i-an, we said might stay if that were the wish of the Mex-i-cans. When the French troops left, in 1867, this head man would not go with them, so the