It must have taken a good deal of self-control on the part of the President, in possession of all these facts, to keep them quietly to himself for more than a month from the time of Judge Black's retirement from his case, while his enemies were pointing the finger of a supposed triumphant scorn at him as being unworthy to have so honest a man as Judge Black among his counsel, and then to allow them to be given out only under provocation from the managers of the impeachment, taunting him with his treatment of Judge Black, and with Judge Black's withdrawal from his case.
[Sidenote: The contents of the President's answer.]
But to return to the President's answer to the charges against him. Disregarding again legal verbiage and order, the President answered substantially that Stanton's case was not affected by the Tenure-of-Office Act, and that he held his office, according to the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the wording of his commission, at the pleasure of the President; that even if Stanton's case were covered by the Act, the President was within his right and was not thereby committing any crime or misdemeanor at all, to so act as to make up an issue { 179} before the Supreme Court of the United States, whereby the constitutionality of the Act might be tested; that the authority given to General Thomas to act as Secretary of War _ad interim_ was not an appointment nor an attempt to make an appointment, but was only a designation of a person to act temporarily until an appointment could be made by and with the consent of the Senate, a thing which the President was empowered to do by the Act of February 13th, 1795, still in force; that he had not entered into any conspiracy with Thomas or anybody else to force Stanton out of the War Office, or to seize the property and papers of the United States in the War Office, that he could not in fact do so, since Stanton was not lawfully in the War Office, and since the President of the United States was the ultimate lawful custodian of the property and papers of the United States in the War Office, but that his communications with Thomas were orders from the President to a subordinate officer, to whom the President gave no authority to use force for their execution, and who did not use any force in his attempts to execute them, the intention of the President only being, if his authority should be resisted by Mr. Stanton, to create an issue before the Supreme Court of the United States, and secure thereby a judicial determination of the rights and powers of the parties concerned, and not to do anything unlawful; that he had never undertaken to induce General Emory to take his orders immediately from himself in violation of the Act of March 2d, 1867, which provided that all of the military orders and instructions issuing from the President and the Secretary of War should pass through the hands of the General of the Army, but that he had only expressed to General Emory, as he had to Congress, his conviction that the Act was in violation of the Constitution, which latter { 180} conferred upon the President the Commandership-in-chief of the army and the navy; and finally, that his speeches were simply the expression of his opinions as a free citizen of the Republic, which right was guaranteed to him and to every other citizen by the Constitution of the country, and could not be made out in any way to have any of the qualities of a crime or a misdemeanor, and that his declaration that the Thirty-ninth Congress was a Congress of only a part of the "States" was intended by him in no other sense than that of an assertion that ten "States" of the Union were not represented in it, all of which ought to be so represented when they should send loyal men to take seats therein, and that he had never intended by this declaration to deny the validity of the acts of the Congress or its power to originate and adopt an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.