First of all, you here admit that from the very beginning of what you term “the whole history” of your connection with Mr. Stanton’s suspension you intended to circumvent the President.  It was to carry out that intent that you accepted the appointment.  This was in your mind at the time of your acceptance.  It was not, then, in obedience to the order of your superior, as has heretofore been supposed, that you assumed the duties of the office.  You knew it was the President’s purpose to prevent Mr. Stanton from resuming the office of Secretary of War, and you intended to defeat that purpose.  You accepted the office, not in the interest of the President but of Mr. Stanton.  If this purpose, so entertained by you, had been confined to yourself; if when accepting the office you had done so with a mental reservation to frustrate the President, it would have been a tacit deception.  In the ethics of some persons such a course is allowable.  But you can not stand even upon that questionable ground.  The “history” of your connection with this transaction, as written by yourself, places you in a different predicament, and shows that you not only concealed your design from the President, but induced him to suppose that you would carry out his purpose to keep Mr. Stanton out of office by retaining it yourself after an attempted restoration by the Senate, so as to require Mr. Stanton to establish his right by judicial decision.

I now give that part of this “history” as written by yourself in your letter of the 28th ultimo:[38]

“Some time after I assumed the duties of Secretary of War ad interim the President asked me my views as to the course Mr. Stanton would have to pursue, in case the Senate should not concur in his suspension, to obtain possession of his office.  My reply was, in substance, that Mr. Stanton would have to appeal to the courts to reinstate him, illustrating my position by citing the ground I had taken in the case of the Baltimore police commissioners.”

Now, at that time, as you admit in your letter of the 3d instant,[39] you held the office for the very object of defeating an appeal to the courts.  In that letter you say that in accepting the office one motive was to prevent the President from appointing some other person who would retain possession, and thus make judicial proceedings necessary.  You knew the President was unwilling to trust the office with anyone who would not by holding it compel Mr. Stanton to resort to the courts.  You perfectly understood that in this interview, “some time” after you accepted the office, the President, not content with your silence, desired an expression of your views, and you answered him that Mr. Stanton “would have to appeal to the courts.”  If the President reposed confidence before he knew your views, and that confidence had been violated, it might have been said he made a mistake; but a violation of confidence reposed after that conversation