Excerpt from Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Union League, of Philadelphia: December 10th, 1866 But in the inscrutable wisdom of God, our nation was doomed to suffer from another, and, if possible, more de testable treachery than that which had inspired the recent Rebellion. The man whom our votes had elevated to the second place in the gift of the nation, and whom the hand of the assassin raised to the first, almost from the day that he assumed supreme power, set himself about proving that he was worthy of the manner of his succes sion. Not only did he betray every trust that we had reposed in him, but he became false to his own record, his own pledges and protestations, and to the very words which we had applauded in his first message to Congress. Those fundamental principles of the Union Party, which we had followed devotedly through the clouds of innu merable battles, and towards which we looked as our guides in the settlement of the various questions that might occur in the peace then happily surrounding us principles to which he had voluntarily sworn allegiance a thousand times and in a thousand ways, with an excess of frothy utterance that went far beyond our extremest demand - these principles he at first criticized, then sug gested substitutes for them, and at length openly repu diated them both in word and in deed. That every voice of the Union Party was raised in indignation and con demnation, could have been no wonder to the man him self. That Congress taught him many a bitter lesson in the dark ways of his treachery, by overruling his vetoes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.