A Probability | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 10, 1867

A Probability.

THE probabilities of the impeachment of the President are certainly greater than when Congress adjourned. If he should be impeached at the next session the probability is that he will forcibly resist. This is a contingency that should be calmly contemplated. If it be treated merely as a stroke upon the Radical bottom the consequences will be much more disagreeable than if the probability be fairly considered. It will certainly be conceded that the worst view of the President has always proved to be the truest. No subserviency to his will in the hope of moderating or restraining him is of the slightest use. We presume that Mr. Seward, and perhaps Mr. Weed, have learned this truth. Indeed, those who could not easily relinquish their admiration of Mr. Seward were accustomed to say that he remained in the Cabinet in order to avert the sure evils that he saw rising in the future. Whether he has averted them those reluctant friends can answer. Whether a truly sagacious man would have made the attempt it is not difficult to say.

What form the resistance of the President may take it is not easy to foresee. The probability is, that he would deny the authority of Congress as “a body hanging upon the verge of the Government,” and refuse to recognize its summons or to submit to its judgment. He would wish to make a plain and simple issue. He would declare that he could not yield to an illegal process except upon compulsion, and that it would be his duty to use the whole force of the United States to save the government threatened in his person. It would, therefore, be necessary for Congress before impeaching to provide by law for the suspension of the President during his trial. If the law were vetoed and passed by the necessary majority the President could have no reason to deny the validity of the law passed by an authority which he has constantly practically recognized.

Nothing can be done toward a real reconstruction during the Presidency of Mr. Johnson. He incessantly demoralizes every effort at the South, and it is he who makes New Orleans massacres possible, and he who really inspires the speeches of Perry, Hill, and Herschel V. Johnson. The tenacious rebel element clings to him as its hope. It believes that something may yet happen. It sees Johnson resisting Congress, and removing Stanton and Sheridan, and it reads in the New York World that there is a great reaction, and in the Albany Argus that the Democrats will probably carry New York, and in the New York Herald that the people are rallying to the President against “nigger supremacy.” Upon such puffs of east wind the rebel hope feeds, and is able to keep its section in a state of sullenness and agitation, and to defer actual submission to the will of Congress until it sees a President who means to execute that will.

Meanwhile the President has no comprehension of the principle which elected him; no sympathy with the popular purpose, and he perpetually prates about the Constitution, as if Congress and the people did not know the Constitution and its spirit quite as well as he. Whatever he designs to do will be done under the name of the Constitution. When the rebel Senators withdrew, it will be remembered, they told us that the Constitution forbade us to resist. James Buchanan, the President, told us that they spoke the truth, that there was no Constitutional authority for the coercion of States. It was by the alleged authority of the Constitution that the Constitution was to be overthrown. And we may be very sure that if the President attempts mischief it will be attempted, he will inform us, to save the Constitution.

Great exigencies are not averted by denying that they exist. Andrew Johnson will go just as far as he dares, and his daring will be limited only by inflexible opposition. We presume nobody supposes that he would not use violence if he could. Let him therefore be watched, and let him understand that he is watched. Let him learn by the plainest expression that every act of defiance of what he knows to be the loyal, popular will of the country, however it may be technically authorized, is an act which reconciles hundreds of thousands to his impeachment who had always thought it inexpedient. Let him know that much of the opposition to impeachment sprang from the feeling that he had not deliberately set himself to defeat the will of Congress, and that those who opposed it until that intention was clear would earnestly advocate it when that intention was beyond doubt. His puerile plot to implicate Judge Holt, and other Radical men, with a wretched conspiracy, has ridiculously failed. He has done more than seemed possible for any man to do to increase sympathy with the extreme Radical tendency. He is a desperate man, and desperation dares anything.—Harper’s Weekly.