Restoring the Union
the misguided President and it was supported by the overwhelming mass of the American people. In the conflict which arose over it the House of Representatives presented a bill of impeachment against the President and he narrowly escaped conviction and removal from office.
The Republican majority in Congress was sufficiently large to enable it to enact legislation over the President's veto, and it accordingly set itself to the task of reconstruction with little regard for his vagaries. His stubborn refusal to co-operate with Congress, however, and a certain unaccommodating spirit which his course had provoked and fostered in the lately seceding states, greatly added to the arduousness of a task which in any case would have been of enormous difficulty, with the result that the ensuing years of the "Reconstruction Era” were marked with some regrettable incidents and circumstances not properly chargeable to the Republican government and party. On the other hand, as direct results of the application of Republican principles, those years were conspicuously marked with some of the finest achievements in reconciliatory and reconstructive statesmanship that the world has ever seen.
The first principle was to treat the lately seceding states as having always remained members of the Union. There was no thought of altering their boundaries, their names, their divisions, their capitols. The map of the United States was to remain unchanged. Their citizens, too, were held always to have remained American citizens, though certain of their civil rights had been temporarily forfeited by their own acts. There was no proscription nor attainder, there was no
55
