“What a muddle we are in politically!” he exclaimed. “Was there ever such a madman in so high a place as Johnson?” Senator John Sherman told his brother that the President had “sunk the Presidential office to the level of a grog-house.” Some moderates were even less kind: they said Johnson might be cunning and skillful, but he was basically a hazy-headed demagogue who should resign his office so it might be said that “nothing in his official life ever became him like his leaving of it.”
