Mr.Johnson alleged that the fair understanding was that General Grant should, by retaining his portfolio, aid in bringing the case before the Supreme Court of the United States.

General Grant denied this with much warmth, declaring in a letter addressed to the President that the latter had made "many and gross misrepresentations concerning this subject." It was doubtless in the beginning a perfectly honest misapprehension between the two.

General Grant had on a certain occasion remarked that "Mr.
Stanton would have to appeal to the courts to re-instate him," and the President, hastily perhaps, but not unnaturally, assumed that by this language General Grant meant that he would himself aid in bringing the matter to judicial arbitrament.

But the President ought to have seen and realized that such a step would be altogether foreign to the duty of the Commander of the Army, and that with General Grant's habitual prudence he never could have intended to provoke a controversy with Congress, and get himself entangled in the meshes of the Tenure-of-office Law.

The wrath of both men was fully aroused, and the controversy closed by leaving them enemies for life--unreconciled, irreconcilable.
The severance of friendly relations between the President and General Grant was not distasteful to the Republicans of the country.