Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1869 — Mr. Johnson's farewell. [ARTICLE]

Mr. Johnson's farewell.

In leaving the Presidential office and, as be says, surrendering the government into the bauds of his successor, Mr. Johnson took occasion to issue a farewell addreas to ! the people of the United States. — We have not room to present this address in the Union, the space being occupied with matter which we think will prove more interesting to the majority of our readers. The farewell ia very much after the manner of its message and veto [ predecessors, fult ofaelf-praise, barrowing details of martyrdom for his constitutional love, persecution for i righteousness sake, and protestations of eternal devotion to principle, together with wonderful and abiding confidence in the wisdom and integrity of the people, an abiding faith in their ability for self-government, and interspersed with bitterness and malice, reproach and crimination, towards and of the Republican party, its leaders, representatives, abettors and friends. He contends that time and the events of his administration have fully vindicated bis policy of the reconstruction of the Southern State, lie charges upon a corrupt, wilful and perverse Congress the responsibility tor the outrages that have begn committed in the South from time to time since the war closed, and absolves himself from all complicity, directly or remotely in the massacres and bloodshed in that distracted section since the war. It was the perversity of Congress, he says, in not ordering Jeff. Davis and his confreres to trial, that provoked him to grant them full amnesty and pardon for crimes they had committed against the country. Thus Mr. Johnson’s last act before laying aside the robes oi office was to denounce Congress as responsible and chargeable for the prominent features of his administration. And in framing his excuse and vindication, instead of boldly advocating them as the result of sincere conviction in their justice and wisdom, he in effect admits them to be wrong, and leaves the impression that they were born of studied malice and adopted as measures of retaliation to punish congressional opposition, and in this manner he adds to the charges of his most hostile enemies tbe testimony of bis own admissions, and places his friends before the country as the dupes of a revengeful charlatan.