It has been rather the fashion to picture Johnson, as an intemperate and bull-headed ignoramus, but such a characterization is far from fair.  But for Lincoln’s assassination, some such policy of reconstruction as Johnson advocated would probably have been carried out, instead of the policy of fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens, which left the South a prey to the carpet-bagger and the ignorant negro for over a decade.  Johnson himself might have accomplished more if he had been of a less violent disposition; but he was ignorant of diplomacy, incapable of compromise, and so was worsted in the fight.  However we may disagree with his policy and dislike his character, let us at least not forget that picture of the “poor white” boy teaching himself to read; and that other of the girl-wife patiently instructing him in the rudiments of writing.

* * * * *

A successful war inevitably gives to its commanders a tremendous popular prestige.  We have seen how the battle of New Orleans made Andrew Jackson a national hero, how William Henry Harrison loomed large after the battle of Tippecanoe, and how Zachary Taylor was chosen President as a result of his victories in Mexico.  The country was now to undergo another period of military domination, longer lived than those others, as the Civil War was greater than them—­a period from which it has even yet not fully recovered.

In 1868, the Republican party nominated unanimously for President the general who had pushed the war to a successful finish, and who had received Lee’s surrender, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and he was elected by an overwhelming majority.  For the first time in the history of the country, a man had been elected President without regard to his qualifications for the office, for even Jackson had had many years’ experience in public affairs.  Of such qualifications, Grant had very few.  He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance.  As a result, his administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in a swirl of scandal.

Born in Ohio in 1822, and graduated at West Point, he had served through the war with Mexico, resigned from the army, remained in obscurity for six years, during which he made an unsuccessful attempt to support himself in civil life, and entered the army again at the outbreak of the Civil War.  From the first he was successful more than any other of the Union generals, not so much because of military genius as from a certain tenacity of purpose with which he fairly wore out the enemy.  But a people discouraged by reverses were not disposed to inquire too closely into the reason of his victories, and early in 1864, after a brilliant campaign along the Mississippi, he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Union army, and began that series of operations against Richmond which cost the North so dear, but which resulted in the fall of the capital of the Confederacy and in Lee’s surrender.