If I find it does continue to be a State after that, then I shall strive to ascertain whether it will so continue to be a Government--a State--after, by means of universal treason, it has ceased to have any constitution, laws…

It was absolutely without acrimony, it contained no harsh word, it made no personal reflection; but the whole duty of the United States, and the whole power of the United States to do its duty, were set forth with absolute precision of…

In it they threw off and defied the authority of your Constitution, your laws, and your Government.

They obliterated from their State constitutions and laws every vestige of recognition of your Government.

They discarded all their official oaths, and took, in their places, oaths to support your enemies' government.

They seized, in their States, all the Nation's property.

Their senators and representatives in your Congress insulted, bantered, defied and then left you.

They expelled from their land or assassinated every inhabitant of known loyalty.

They passed sequestration and other Acts in flagitious violation of the law of nations, making every citizen of the United States an alien enemy, and placing in the treasury of their rebellion all money and property due such citizens.

They framed iniquity and universal murder into law.

For years they besieged your Capital and sent your bleeding armies in rout back here upon the very sanctuaries of your national power.

They carved the bones of your unburied heroes into ornaments and drank from goblets made out of their skulls.

They poisoned your fountains, put mines under your soldiers' prisons, organized bands whose leaders were concealed in your homes, and whose commissions ordered the torch to be carried to your cities, and the yellow-fever to your wives and…

They planned one universal bonfire of the North, from Lake Ontario to the Missouri.

They murdered, by systems of starvation and exposure, sixty thousand of your sons as brave and heroic as ever martyrs were.

They destroyed, in the four years of horrid war, another army so large that it would reach almost around the globe in marching-column.

And then to give to the infernal drama a fitting close, and to concentrate into one crime all that is criminal in crime and all that is detestable in barbarism, they murdered the President of the United States.

I allude to them to remind us how utter was the overthrow and the obliteration of all government, divine and human, how total was the wreck of all constitutions and laws, political, civil and international.

I allude to them to condense their monstrous enormities of guilt into one crime, and to point the gentleman from New York to it and tell him that that was the specific act.

A House, four-fifths of whose members were Republicans, had refused to pass a resolution expressing confidence in the President who, fourteen months before, had received the vote of every Republican in the Nation.

It may not be said that all hope of reconciliation was abandoned, but friendly co-operation to any common end became extremely difficult.

Shellabarger had destroyed his argument, and had given a rallying-point for the Republicans, so incontestably strong as to hold the entire party in allegiance to principle rather than in allegiance to the Administration.

His talents were acknowledged; his courteous manners, his wide intelligence, his generous hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes.

It has long been a tradition of the House that no man becomes its leader who does not enter it before he is forty.

Like most sweeping affirmations this has its exceptions, but the list of young men who have been advanced to prominent positions in the body is so large that it may well be assumed as the rule of promotion.