ACCUMULATION OF IMPEACHABLE OFFENCES.
This is nothing but the outline, derived from historic sources which the Senate on this occasion is bound to recognize. Other acts fall within the picture. The officers he appointed in defiance of law were paid also in the same defiance. Millions of property were turned over without consideration to railroad companies, whose special recommendation was participation in the Rebellion. The Freedmen’s Bureau, that sacred charity of the Republic, was despoiled of its possessions for the sake of Rebels, to whom their forfeited estates were given back after they had been vested by law in the United States. The proceeds of captured and abandoned property, lodged under law in the National Treasury, were ravished from their place of deposit and sacrificed. Rebels were allowed to fill the antechambers of the Executive Mansion and to enter into the counsels. The pardoning power was prostituted, and pardons were issued in lots to suit Rebels, thus grossly abusing that trust whose discreet exercise is so essential to the administration of justice. The powers of the Senate over appointments were trifled with and disregarded by reappointing persons already rejected, and by refusing to communicate the names of others appointed during the recess. The veto power, conferred by the National Constitution as a remedy for ill-considered legislation, was turned by him into a weapon of offence against Congress, and into an instrument to beat down the just opposition which his usurpation had aroused. The power of removal, so sparingly exercised by patriot Presidents, was seized as an engine of tyranny, and openly employed to maintain his wicked purposes, by the sacrifice of good citizens who would not be his tools. Incompetent and dishonest creatures, recommended only by their echoes to his voice, were appointed to office, especially in the collection of the internal revenue, through whom a new organization, known as the “Whiskey Ring,” has been able to prevail over the Government, and to rob the Treasury of millions, at the cost of tax-paying citizens, whose burdens are thus increased. Laws enacted by Congress for the benefit of the colored race, including that great statute for the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and that other great statute for the establishment of Civil Rights, were first attacked by Presidential veto, and, when finally passed by requisite majority over the veto, were treated by him as little better than dead letter, while he boldly attempted to arrest a Constitutional Amendment by which the rights of citizens and the national debt were placed under the guaranty of irrepealable law. During these successive assumptions, usurpations, and tyrannies, utterly without precedent in our history, this deeply guilty man ventured upon public speeches, each an offence to good morals, where, lost to all shame, he appealed in coarse words to the coarse passions of the coarsest people, scattering firebrands of sedition, inflaming anew the rebel spirit, insulting good citizens, and, with regard to office-holders, announcing, in his own characteristic phrase, that he would “kick them out,”—the whole succession of speeches being, from their brutalities and indecencies, in the nature of a “criminal exposure of his person,” indictable at Common Law, for which no judgment can be too severe. Even this revolting transgression has additional aggravation, when it is considered, that, through these utterances, the cause of justice was imperilled, and the accursed demon of civil feud lashed again into vengeful fury.
All these things, from beginning to end, are plain facts, recorded in our annals, and known to all. And it is further recorded in our annals and known to all, that, through these enormities,—any one of which is ample for condemnation, while all together present an aggregation of crime,—untold calamities have been brought upon our country, disturbing business and finance, diminishing the national revenues, postponing specie payments, dishonoring the Declaration of Independence in its grandest truths, arresting the restoration of the Rebel States, reviving the dying Rebellion, and, instead of that peace and reconciliation so much longed for, sowing strife and wrong, whose natural fruit is violence and blood.