The substantial correctness of the report made by the majority of the Congressional Committee was never shaken, though it was angrily attacked by the supporters of the Administration. Aside from the credit imparted to it by the conscientious character of both Mr. Eliot and Mr. Shellabarger, the corroboration of all its material statements by the Commission of Army officers was invaluable. The military men were not suspected of partisan motives. They had no political theories to maintain, no animosities to indulge, no personal revenges to cherish. They proceeded as coolly as though they were investigating alleged frauds by army contractors or were hearing evidence touching the damage to frontier settlers by an Indian raid. The intelligence and impartiality of investigations entrusted to army officers have become proverbial, and their report of the facts in the New Orleans riot arrested the attention of the North in an unprecedented degree. Every thing possible was done by the opponents of the Republican party to break the force of the damaging facts, but apparently without success. Indeed the people of the United States have rarely been stirred to greater excitement than that aroused by the full details of this nefarious transaction as it came to them through the public press and through official reports. The effect was disastrous to the President, and was hurtful, in the extreme, to the cause of prompt reconstruction. The Northern people shrank from the responsibility of transferring the government of States to the control of men who had already shown themselves capable of desperate deeds. In their wrathful zeal for justice they would hear no apology and no defense of the President. They held him as an accomplice in the crime,--as one having in advance a guilty knowledge of the pre-arranged assassination. In every way in which public indignation can be expressed, in every form in which public anger can vent itself, the loyal people of the Northern states manifested their feelings, and did not spare in their bitter denunciations the personal character of the President or the unspeakable guilt of his Southern supporters.
The bloody tragedy of midsummer, which had weighed down the people with a sense of the gravest solicitude, was followed by what might well be termed its comedy. During the early spring the President had accepted an invitation from the citizens of Chicago to attend the ceremony of laying a corner-stone for a monument to be erected to the memory of Stephen A. Douglas. The date fixed for the President's visit was September 6th, and he left Washington on the 28th of August, accompanied by Secretary Welles, Postmaster-general Randall, General Grant, Admiral Farragut, by a considerable number of army officers and by a complement of private secretaries and newspaper reporters,--apparently intending to convert the journey into a political canvass. Mr. Seward joined the company in New York. The somewhat ludicrous effect produced by combining a series of turbulent partisan meetings to be addressed by the President with the solemn duty of paying respect to the memory of a dead statesman, did not fail to have its effect upon the appreciative mind of his countrymen, and from the beginning to the end of the tour there was a popular alternation between harsh criticism and contemptuous raillery of Mr. Johnson's conduct.