It will be remembered that the Senate had insisted that officers of the Cabinet should be excepted from the operation of the Tenure-of-office Act, and the House had insisted that they should not be excepted.

A compromise was made by the conference committee, the result of which was thus explained to the Senate by Mr.Sherman: "In this case the committee of conference -- I agreed to it, I confess, with some reluctance--came to the conclusion to qualify to some extent the power of removal over a Cabinet minister.

We provide that a Cabinet minister shall hold his office, _not for a fixed term, not until the Senate shall consent to his removal, but as long as the power that appoints him holds the office_." General Schenck, representing the original House amendment, said: "A compromise was made, by which a further amendment is added to this portion of the bill, so that the term of office of the heads of Departments _shall expire with the term of the President who appointed them_, allowing these heads of Departments one month longer." These were the well-considered explanations made to their respective branches by the chairmen of the committees that composed the conference.

It was upon this uncontradicted, unqualified, universally admitted construction of the Bill that the House and Senate enacted it into a law.
It must not be forgotten that if the Senate had consented to the removal of Mr.Stanton, as was confidently anticipated from the expressions of opinion above quoted, no new Secretary could have been installed without the Senate's explicit consent, and that meanwhile the War Department would remain under the control of General Grant, in whose prudent and upright discharge of duty every senator had perfect confidence.

The complaint of the President's friends, therefore, was that senators, while perfectly able to exclude from the control of the War Department a man in whom they had no confidence, demanded that the President should retain at the head of that Department an officer in whom he had no confidence.