I have always talked kindly to the President, and advised Grant to do so. I do think that it is best for all hands that his administration be allowed to run out its course without threatened or attempted violence. Whoever begins violent proceedings will lose in the long run. Johnson is not a man of action, but of theory, and so long as your party is in doubt as to the true mode of procedure, it would be at great risk that an attempt be made to displease the President by a simple Law of Congress. This is as much as I have ever said to anybody. I have never by word or inference given anybody the right to class me in opposition to or in support of Congress. On the contrary, I told Mr. Johnson that from the nature of things he could not dispense with a Congress to make laws and appropriate money, and suggested to him to receive and make overtures to such men as Fessenden, Trumbull, Sherman, Morgan, and Morton, who, though differing with him in abstract views of Constitutional Law and Practice, were not destructive. That if the Congressional plan of reconstruction succeeded, he could do nothing, and if it failed or led to confusion, the future developed results in his favor, etc.; and that is pretty much all I have ever said or done. At the meeting of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee on the 13th inst., I will be forced to speak, if here, and though I can confine myself purely to the military events of the past, I can make the opportunity of stating that in no event will I be drawn into the complications of the civil politics of this country.
If Congress could meet and confine itself to current and committee business, I feel certain that everything will work along quietly till the nominations are made, and a new Presidential election will likely settle the principle if negroes are to be voters in the States without the consent of the whites. This is more a question of prejudice than principle, but a voter has as much right to his prejudices as to his vote.
SOURCE: Rachel Sherman Thorndike, Editor, The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, p. 297-8
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