Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/46



The feeling of political uncertainty which pervaded the Nation after the death of President Lincoln and the inauguration of Andrew Johnson, was strikingly reflected in Oregon. Political chaos reigned for months. The political associations which had resulted from the war were on the verge of dissolution over the issues which the war had raised. Readjustments were being sought, very cautiously and warily. But in all this political shifting, the new President was an important factor. The fact that he was an unknown quantity added to the confusion of the situation which political conditions in Oregon would have rendered sufficiently confusing at best. Every faction and every .newspaper was busily trying to find itself politically, in relation to the President. Each faction was accusing all the others of crafty designs and selfish purposes. The unmodified Democrats hated Johnson and hated the Bush-Douglas-McClellan factionists who were evidently preparing to become Johnson Democrats. One wing of the Union party, whose exponent was the Statesman, was loyally supporting Johnson, but looked askance at the Bush faction. The members of the latter were accused of planning a flank movement for the purpose of capturing the Johnson idea for their wing of the Democratic party and thus knocking out the foundations from under the Union party's platform. The other wing of the Union party, led by the Oregonian, was already reflecting the radical Republican movement of the East by covertly attacking Johnson. The Oregonian and the Statesman were again manifesting that cordial hatred toward each other which had characterized the days of the old Democratic Regime, when the columns of each were made lurid by the flaming pens of Dryer and Bush. Each was soon applying the epithet of "Copperhead" to the other.

Harding was now regarded as an apostate by the Unionists. On his return from Washington in March, 1865, the Statesman, in what might be termed a prose version of Whittier's "Ichabod," grieved over him as lost to the Union cause which