He left Washington on the 27th of November and passed through Virginia "without conversing or meeting with any of its citizens." He spent one day in North Carolina, one in South Carolina and two in Georgia.

This was the whole extent of the observation upon which General Grant had innocently given his views, without the remotest suspicion that his brief report was to figure largely in the discussions of Congress upon the important and absorbing question of reconstruction.
The divergent conclusions which were thus made to appear between the authors of the conflicting reports did not cease with this single exhibition.

It was soon perceived that in the President's anxiety to parry the effect of Mr.Schurz's report he had placed General Grant in a false position,--a position which no one realized more promptly than the General himself.

Further investigation led him to a thorough understanding of the subject and to a fundamental change of opinion.
It led him to approve the reconstruction measures of the Republican party, and in a subsequent and more exalted sphere to continue the policy which these measures foreshadowed and implied.

Mr.Schurz, on the other hand, received new light and conviction in the opposite direction, and from the point of extreme Republicanism he gradually changed his creed and became, first a distracting element in the ranks of the party, and afterwards one of its malignant opponents in a great national struggle in which General Grant was the leader,--the aim of which struggle was really to maintain the views which Mr.Schurz had, with apparent sincerity, endeavored to enforce in his report to President Johnson.