They gave credulous ear, therefore, to these extravagant rumors; and in the end they succeeded in making a deep impression upon the minds of certain members of the Committee charged with the investigation into the President's official conduct.
The persons who were giving currency to these rumors never seemed to realize that General Grant, with his loyalty, his patriotism, and his high sense of personal and official honor, could not for a moment have even so much as listened to a proposition which involved an attack upon the legitimacy of the Congress of the United States, and practically contemplated its overthrow through means not different from those by which Cromwell closed the sessions of the Long Parliament.
Nothing can be more certain than the fact that if President Johnson had ever made such an intimation to General Grant, it would have been at once exposed and denounced with a soldier's directness; and the President would have been promptly impeached for an offense in which his guilt would not have been doubtful.
It was not surprising, therefore, that by General Grant's testimony,( 1) the entire charge was dissipated into thin air, and proved to be only one of the thousand baseless rumors which in that exciting period were constantly filling the political atmosphere.

It was perhaps the intention of the Committee in examining General Grant on this point, to give him an opportunity in an official report to stamp the current rumors as utterly false.

It can hardly be possible that a single member of the Committee believed that General Grant had silently received from the President a deliberate proposition to revolutionize the Government.

When the essential truth of the matter was reached, it was found that General Grant had never heard any thing from the President, on the question of organizing Congress, at all different from the premises he had assumed in the series of disreputable speeches delivered by him in his extraordinary tour through the country the preceding year.
There was a marked divergence of views in the recommendations from the Judiciary Committee.

The majority, Messrs.