Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/273

  Lincoln, evidently belonged to that unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a disturbance of friendly intercourse. This is apt to be especially the case when such persons change their position and then get angry at those who will not change their positions likewise. The exhibitions of ill temper on the part of the President could hardly fail to be more or less resented and reciprocated by members of Congress against whom they were directed. By many of them Mr. Johnson was regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of his disgraceful exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the Inauguration ceremonies, which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of ungentlemanly character. All these things co-operated to impart to the controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious. The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress, which was to rage for four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives by the introduction, even before the reading of the President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress. This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of Republican dissenters, who openly took the President's part, there were but few—in the Senate Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut, Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and for a short period, Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward; in the