He had professed the most radical creed of their party, had sought their confidence, had received their suffrages.
Entrusted with the chief Executive power of the Nation by Republican ballots, he professed upon his accession to office the most entire devotion to the principles of the party; but he had, with a baseness hardly to be exaggerated, repudiated his professions, deserted the friends who had confided in him, and made an alliance with those who had been the bitterest foes of the Union in the bloody struggle which had just closed.
In the outraged and resentful minds of those who had sustained the Union cause through its trials, the real offenses of the President were clearly seen, and bitterly denounced:--his hostility to the Fourteenth Amendment; his unwillingness to make citizenship National; his opposition to all efforts to secure the safety of the public debt, and the sacredness of the soldier's pension; his resistance to measures that would put the rebel debt beyond the possibility of being a burden upon the whole nation or even upon the people of the Southern States; his determination that freedmen should not be placed within the protection of Organic law; his eagerness to turn the Southern States over to the control of the rebel element, without condition and without restraint; his fixed hostility to every form of reconstruction that looked to national safety and the prevention of another rebellion; his opposition to every scheme that tended to equalize representation in Congress, North and South, and his persistent demand that the negro should be denied suffrage, yet be counted in the basis of apportionment; his treacherous and malignant conduct in connection with the atrocious massacre at New Orleans; his hostility to the growth of free States in the North-West, while he was constantly urging the instant re-admission of all the rebel States; his denial of a morsel of food to the suffering and starving negro and white Unionist of the South in their dire extremity, as shown by his veto of the Freedmen's-bureau Bill; his cruel attempt to exclude the colored man from the power to protect himself by law, in his shameless veto of the Civil Rights Bill; and last, and worst of all, his heartless abandonment of that Union-loving class of white men in the South who became the victims of rebel hatred, from which he had himself escaped only by the strength of the National arms.

In recounting all the acts which made up the roll of his political dishonor, Johnson had, in Republican opinion, committed none so hideous as his turning over the Southern Unionists to the vengeance of those who, as he well knew, were incapable of dealing with them in a spirit of justice, and who were unwilling to show mercy, even after they had themselves received it in quality that was not strained.
Could the President have been legally and constitutionally impeached for these offenses he should not have been allowed to hold his office for an hour beyond the time required for a fair trial.

But the Articles of Impeachment did not even refer to any charge of this kind, and a stranger to our history, in perusing them, could not possibly infer that behind the legal verbiage of the Articles there was in the minds of the representatives who presented them a deadly hostility to the President for offenses totally different from the technical violation of a statue, for which he was arraigned,--a statute that never ought to have been enacted, as was practically confessed by its framers, when, within less than a year after the Impeachment trial had closed, they modified its provisions by taking away their most offensive features.
The charges on which the House actually arraigned the President were in substance, that he had violated the Tenure-of-office Act; that he had conspired with Lorenzo Thomas to violate it; that he had consulted with General Emory to see whether, independent of the General-in-Chief, he could not issue orders to the army to aid him in his determination to violate it; and lastly, that he had spoken of Congress in such a manner as tended to bring a co-ordinate branch of the Government into "disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach." The charge of conspiring with Lorenzo Thomas, as well as that in respect to General Emory, appeared in the end to be not only unsustained, but trivial.
The President had conspired in precisely the same way with General Sherman when he urged him to accept the post of Secretary of War as Mr.
Stanton's successor.

The charge that he had attempted to bring Congress into "disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach," was laughingly answered in popular opinion, by the fact that he not been able to say half so many bitter things about Congress as Congress had said about him; and that, as the elections had shown, Congress had triumphed, and turned the popular contempt and ridicule against the President.

Besides, the offense charged against the President had been committed nearly two years before, and seemed to be recalled now for popular effect in the construction of the Articles of Impeachment.
This charge richly deserved the satire it received at the hands of Judge Curtis when he spoke of "the House of Representatives erecting itself into a school of manners, and desiring the judgment of the Senate whether the President has not been guilty of an indecorum; whether he has spoken properly ?".