The madness that would set aside provisions so essentially just, whose only error is inadequacy, has broken forth naturally in brutal utterance, where he has charged persons by name with seeking his life, and has stimulated a mob against them. It is difficult to surpass the criminality of this act. The violence of the President has provoked violence. His words were dragon’s teeth, which have sprung up armed men. Witness Memphis; witness New Orleans. Who can doubt that the President is author of these tragedies? Charles the Ninth of France was not more completely author of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew than Andrew Johnson is author of the recent massacres now crying out for judgment. History records that the guilty king was pursued in the silence of night by the imploring voices of murdered men, mingled with curses and imprecations, while ghosts stalked through his chamber, until he sweated blood from every pore; and when he came to die, his soul, wrung with the tortures of remorse, stammered out, “Ah, nurse, my good nurse! what blood! what murders! Oh, what bad counsels I followed! Lord God, pardon me! have mercy on me!” Like causes produce like effects. The blood at Memphis and New Orleans must cry out until heard, and a guilty President may suffer the retribution which followed a guilty king.
The evil he has done already is on such a scale that it is impossible to measure it, unless as you measure an arc of the globe. I doubt if in all history there is any ruler who in the same brief space of time has done so much. There have been kings and emperors, proconsuls and satraps, who have exercised tyrannical power; but facilities of communication now lend swiftness and extension to all evil influences, so that the President is able to do in a year what in other days would have taken a life. Nor is the evil confined to any narrow spot. It is coextensive with the Republic. Next to Jefferson Davis stands Andrew Johnson as its worst enemy. The whole country has suffered; but the Rebel region has suffered most. He should have sent peace; instead, he sent a sword. Behold the consequences!
In support of a cruel “policy” he has not hesitated to use his enormous patronage. President Lincoln said, familiarly, that, as the people had continued him in office, he supposed they meant that others should be continued also; and he refused to make removals. But President Johnson announces “rotation in office”; and then, warming in anger against all failing to sustain his “policy,” he roars that he will “kick them out.” Men appointed by the martyred Lincoln are to be “kicked out” by the successor, while he pretends to sustain the policy of the martyr. The language of the President is most suggestive. He “kicks” the friends of his well-loved predecessor; and he also “kicks” the careful counsel of that well-loved predecessor, that we must “build up from the sound materials.”