Johnson was from Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under Stoneman's assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance with Lincoln's plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting the favour of traitors and rebels.
Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial, impeachment, and removal from office.
Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the "conquered provinces" of the South to Negro rule.
President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the constitutional rights of the states that it failed by one vote to find the two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.
The old Commoner's eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when this vote was announced.
With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his own party who had faltered.
As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:
"If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I'd hang the man at the other end of the Avenue from the
